re and there pale spiral vortices might be seen, which
were whirls of fine snow, snatched from the ground by the wind and blown
away. Successive undulations of ground, become suddenly misty, rolled
themselves into the horizon. The great dull plains were lost under the
white fog. Deep silence. It spread like infinity, and was hush as the
tomb.

The child turned again towards the sea.

The sea, like the land, was white--the one with snow, the other with
foam. There is nothing so melancholy as the light produced by this
double whiteness.

Certain lights of night are very clearly cut in their hardness; the sea
was like steel, the cliff like ebony. From the height where the child
was the bay of Portland appeared almost like a geographical map, pale,
in a semicircle of hills. There was something dreamlike in that
nocturnal landscape--a wan disc belted by a dark crescent. The moon
sometimes has a similar appearance. From cape to cape, along the whole
coast, not a single spark indicating a hearth with a fire, not a lighted
window, not an inhabited house, was to be seen. As in heaven, so on
earth--no light. Not a lamp below, not a star above. Here and there came
sudden risings in the great expanse of waters in the gulf, as the wind
disarranged and wrinkled the vast sheet. The hooker was still visible in
the bay as she fled.

It was a black triangle gliding over the livid waters.

Far away the waste of waters stirred confusedly in the ominous
clear-obscure of immensity. The _Matutina_ was making quick way. She
seemed to grow smaller every minute. Nothing appears so rapid as the
flight of a vessel melting into the distance of ocean.

Suddenly she lit the lantern at her prow. Probably the darkness falling
round her made those on board uneasy, and the pilot thought it necessary
to throw light on the waves. This luminous point, a spark seen from
afar, clung like a corpse light to the high and long black form. You
would have said it was a shroud raised up and moving in the middle of
the sea, under which some one wandered with a star in his hand.

A storm threatened in the air; the child took no account of it, but a
sailor would have trembled. It was that moment of preliminary anxiety
when it seems as though the elements are changing into persons, and one
is about to witness the mysterious transfiguration of the wind into the
wind-god. The sea becomes Ocean: its power reveals itself as Will: that
which one takes for a thing is