l us after a tumultuous night
that we have only been worried by Puck. The scene of frayed waters all
rosy-golden, and golden-banded heathery height, with the tinted sand,
breaking to flights of blue, was resplendent for those of our recent
sea-farers who could lift an eye to enjoy it. Freshness, illumination,
then salt air, vivid distances, were a bath for every sense of life. You
could believe the breast of the mountain to be heaving, the billows to
be kissing fingers to him, the rollers shattered up the cliff to have
run to extinction to scale him. He seemed in his clear-edged mass King
of this brave new boundless world built in a minute out of the wreck of
the old.
An hour back the vessel was labouring through rueful chasms under
darkness, and then did the tricksy Southwest administer grisly slaps to
right and left, whizzing spray across the starboard beam, and drenching
the locks of a young lady who sat cloaked and hooded in frieze to teach
her wilfulness a lesson, because she would keep her place on deck from
beginning to end of the voyage. Her faith in the capacity of Irish
frieze to turn a deluge of the deeps driven by an Atlantic gale was
shaken by the time she sighted harbour, especially when she shed showers
by flapping a batlike wing of the cloak, and had a slight shudder to
find herself trickling within.
'Dear! and I'm wet to the skin,' she confided the fact to herself
vocally.
'You would not be advised,' a gentleman beside her said after a delicate
pause to let her impulsive naturalism of utterance fly by unwounded.
'And aren't you the same and worse? And not liking it either, I fear,
Sir!' she replied, for despite a manful smile his complexion was
tell-tale. 'But there 's no harm in salt. But you should have gone
down to the cabin with Father Boyle and you would have been sure of not
catching cold. But, Oh! the beautiful... look at it! And it's my first
view of England. Well, then, I'll say it's a beautiful country.'
Her companion looked up at the lighted sky, and down at the pools in
tarpaulin at his feet. He repressed a disposition to shudder, and with
the anticipated ecstasy of soon jumping out of wet clothes into dry, he
said: 'I should like to be on the top of that hill now.'
The young lady's eyes flew to the top.
'They say he looks on Ireland; I love him; and his name is Caer Gybi;
and it was one of our Saints gave him the name, I 've read in books.
I'll be there before noon.'
'You
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