ently, was the building of sand-mountains and the digging of pits
with their little wooden spades. One day an elderly gentleman, with a
square, ruddy face, edged with gray whiskers, who had stood observing my
labors in this kind for a long time, stepped up to me as I paused, and
said, with a sort of amused seriousness, "You'll do something when you
grow up, my little lad; your hill is bigger than any of the others'."
He nodded kindly to me and walked off, and I sat down beside my
mountain and watched the tide come up and level it, thinking unutterable
boy-thoughts.

The only approach to sea-side cliffs that we saw was at Whitby, on the
Yorkshire coast, where the abbey of St. Hilda stood, after whom the
American maiden in The Marble Faun was named. But the German Ocean was
bleak and cold, and my experiences in it were even more harrowing than
elsewhere; I can imagine nothing more dispiriting to a small boy than
to be dragged down over a harsh beach in an old-fashioned British
bathing-machine, its damp floor covered with gritty sand, with a tiny
window too high up for him to look out of; undressing in the cold
draughtiness and trying to hang up his clothes on pegs too high for
him to reach; being tossed from side to side, and forward and
backward, meanwhile, by the irregular jerking and swaying of the dismal
contrivance, drawn by the amphibious horses of the region; until at last
he hears the waves begin to dash against it, and it comes to a pause in
a depth which he feels must be fathomless. Then comes a thumping at
the door, and he knows that the bathing-woman is hungrily awaiting his
issuing forth. Nothing else is so terrible in the world--nothing even
in Alice in Wonderland--to a small, naked, shivering boy as the British
bathing-woman. There she stands, waist-deep in the swelling brine; she
grins and chuckles like an ogress; her red, grasping hands stretch
forth like the tentacles of an octopus; she seizes her victim in an
irresistible embrace, and with horrid glee plunges him head-under the
advancing wave. Ere he can fetch his breath to scream, down again he
goes, and yet again. The frigid, heavy water stings his cowering body;
he has swallowed quarts of it; his foot has come in contact with a crab
or a starfish; before him rolls the tumultuous expanse of desolation,
surging forward to take his life; behind him are the rickety steps of
the bathing-machine, which, but now a chamber of torture, has become his
sole hav