England to whom I shall be much
grieved to say farewell; but to the island itself I cannot bear to say
that word as a finality. I shall dreamily hope to come back again at
some indefinite time, rather foolishly, perhaps, for it will tend to
take the substance out of my life in my own land. But this, I suspect,
is apt to be the penalty of those who stay abroad and stay too long."

But my father could not write in London, and, casting about for a
fitting spot, he finally fixed upon the remote hamlet of Redcar, far up
on the bleak coast of Redcar, in Yorkshire. It was not far from Whitby,
where we had been two or three years before. The gray German Ocean
tumbled in there upon the desolate sands, and the contrast of the scene
with those which we had been of late familiar with made the latter, no
doubt, start forward intensely in the romancer's imagination. So there
he wrote and wrote; and he walked far along the sands, with his boy
dogging his steps and stopping for shells and crabs; and at a certain
point of the beach, where the waves ran over a bar and formed a lake a
few feet in depth, he would seat himself on a tussock of sand-grass,
and I would undress and run into the cold water and continue my
swimming-lessons, which had been begun in Stockbridge Bowl, continued in
Lake Leman, and were now brought to a satisfactory conclusion. Both my
feet were finally off the bottom, and I felt the wonderful sensation of
the first cousin to flying. While I floundered there my father looked
off towards the gray horizon, and saw the visions of Hilda, Miriam,
Kenyon, and Donatello which the world of readers was presently to behold
through his eyes. As we walked home in the twilight, the dull-red glow
of the sunset would throw the outlines of the town into dark shadows,
and shed a faint light on the surf roaming in from the east. I found,
in my old album, the black silhouette of the scene which I made one day.
The arms of an old mill are flung appealingly upward, the highest object
of the landscape, above the irregular sky-line of the clustering houses.
There is also, on the next page, a water-color drawing of a sailor in a
blue jersey and a sou'wester, standing, with his hands in his pockets,
on the beach beside one of the boats of the region--a slender,
clipper-built craft, painted yellow below and black above, good for oars
or sail. Her bow rests on a shaft connecting two wheels, for convenience
of running her down into the water. Th