e sun and see the bright red
poppies growing in the chalk, and contribute your share towards
a settlement of the vexed question of which are brigs. There wasn't
another room to be had in the real St. Sennans, and it came to that
or the hotel (which was beastly), and you might just as well be in
London. Thus Sally, and settled the question.

And this is how it comes to pass that at the beginning of
this chapter--which we have only just got to, after all this
circumlocution!--Sally and one of the Julius Bradshaws were sitting
talking on the beach in the shadow of a breakwater, while the other
Julius Bradshaw (the original one) was being taken for a walk to the
extremely white lighthouse three miles off, or nearly five if you
went by the road, by Dr. Conrad, who by this time knew all the walks
in the neighbourhood exactly as well as Sally did, neither more nor
less. And both knew them very well.

The tide had come up quite as far as it had contemplated, and seemed
to have made up its mind this time not to go back in too great a
hurry. It was so nice there on the beach, with Tishy and Sally
and Miss Gwendolen Arkwright, the late bridesmaid, who was having
an independent chat all to herself about the many glories of the
pier-end, and the sights to be seen there by visitors for a penny.
And it--we are speaking of the tide--had got a delightful tangle of
floating weed (_Fucus Vesiculosus_) and well-washed scraps of wood
from long-forgotten wrecks--who knows?--and was turning it gently
to and fro, and over and over, with intermittent musical caresses,
against the shingle-bank, whose counter-music spoke to the sea of
the ages it had toiled in vain to grind it down to sand. And the
tide said, wait, we shall see. The day will come, it said, when not
a pebble of you all but shall be scattered drifting sand, unless you
have the luck to be carted up at a shilling a load by permission of
the authorities, to be made into a concrete of a proper consistency
according to the local by-laws. But the pebbles said, please, no; we
will bide our time down here, and you shall have us for your own--play
with us in the sun at the feet of these two ladies, or make the
whirling shoals of us, beaten to madness, thunder back your voice when
it shouts in the storm to the seaman's wife, who stops her ears in the
dark night alone that she may not hear you heralding her husband's
death. And the tide said very good; but a day would come when the
pebbles