orce as
they increase in speed, like one rushing at a leap; and at last leap
they do, upon the great black mass of shale, tons upon tons in weight,
seeming as if they would sweep it clear away, and rush on in mad ruin to
tumble the fishing luggers together and shatter them like eggs as they
lie softly rubbing together in the harbour.

But no; it is only another of the countless millions of failures on the
part of those Atlantic billows. They leap and fall with a mighty boom
upon that rock, but only to break up with a hissing plash into a mass of
foam, defeated, churned up with froth that runs hissing back, ready to
give way to another wave advancing to the charge.

They have worn the rock smooth, so that it glistens like glass in the
morning sun, for, as if aware of the folly of urging on its regiments of
well-mounted cavalry to come dashing in upon the wild white-maned
sea-horses, or the more sober lines of heavy infantry in uniforms of
green and blue, the sea has for countless ages bombarded Carn Du with
stone-shot in the shape of great boulders. These have ground and
polished off every scrap of seaweed, every barnacle, limpet, and
sea-anemone, leaving the rock all smooth and bare, while the boulders
lie piled to the east in a heap, where the waves that try to take the
rock in flank leap amongst them, and roll them over higher and higher,
to come rumbling down as if they were tiny pebbles instead of rounded
masses of granite and spar-veined stone a quarter, half, and a
hundredweight each.

It was an awful place in a storm--Carn Du. It was there that the great
Austrian full-rigged ship came on, during one black and raging night;
when one minute from the harbour, and off the cliff, the fishermen in
their oilskins could see the lights of a vessel--the next minute,
nothing.

There were the remains of a few timbers, though, in the morning--torn,
twisted, gnawed, as it were, into fibres and splintering rags. That was
all.

It was an awful place in a storm, where the spray, broken up into
feathery froth by the battle on the rocks, came flying over the town,
and then away landward, like a fine misty rain; but it was a grand place
in a calm. It has been said that there was always deep water, even at
low tide, at the foot of the Carn, and here for generations had been the
training place of the swimmers of Carn Du, who were famous for their
prowess all round the coast.

It was too much for the boys, but the performa