d came down again and swept round
and round in a furious chase, shrieking as if mad. At all hours they
drew me to that spot, and standing there, marvelling at their swaying
power and the fury that possessed them, they appeared to me like
tormented beings, and were like those doomed wretches in the halls of
Eblis whose hearts were in a blaze of unquenchable fire, and who,
every one with hands pressed to his breast, went spinning round in an
everlasting agonized dance. They were tormented and crazed by the two
most powerful instincts of birds pulling in opposite directions--the
parental instinct and the passion of migration which called them to the
south.

In such weather, especially on that naked desolate coast, exposed to
the fury of the winds, one marvels at our modern craze for the sea; not
merely to come and gaze upon and listen to it, to renew our youth in its
salt, exhilarating waters and to lie in delicious idleness on the warm
shingle or mossy cliff; but to be always, for days and weeks and even
for months, at all hours, in all weathers, close to it, with its murmur,
"as of one in pain," for ever in our ears.

Undoubtedly it is an unnatural, a diseased, want in us, the result of a
life too confined and artificial in close dirty overcrowded cities. It
is to satisfy this craving that towns have sprung up everywhere on our
coasts and extended their ugly fronts for miles and leagues, with their
tens of thousands of windows from which the city-sickened wretches may
gaze and gaze and listen and feed their sick souls with the ocean. That
is to say, during their indoor hours; at other times they walk or sit
or lie as close as they can to it, following the water as it ebbs and
reluctantly retiring before it when it returns. It was not so formerly,
before the discovery was made that the sea could cure us. Probably our
great-grandfathers didn't even know they were sick; at all events, those
who had to live in the vicinity of the sea were satisfied to be a little
distance from it, out of sight of its grey desolation and, if possible,
out of hearing of its "accents disconsolate." This may be seen anywhere
on our coasts; excepting the seaports and fishing settlements, the towns
and villages are almost always some distance from the sea, often in a
hollow or at all events screened by rising ground and woods from it. The
modern seaside place has, in most cases, its old town or village not far
away but quite as near as the health