r saw so frank a bathing-place. It is beautiful--in a lovely
curve, cliffs clothed with beeches on one side, and the radiant meadow
along the back of the rocks on the other; but the whole island can see
you if you go out far enough to be able to swim, and if you do not you
are still a conspicuous object and a very miserable one, bound to catch
any wandering eye as you stand there alone, towering out of water that
washes just over your ankles.

I sat in the shadow of the cliffs and watched two girls who came down to
bathe. They did not seem to feel their position at all, and splashed
into the water with shrieks and laughter that rang through the mellow
afternoon air. So it was that I saw how shallow it is, and how
embarrassing it would be to the dignified to bathe there. The girls had
no dignity, and were not embarrassed. Probably one, or two, of the
four-and-twenty were their fathers, and that made them feel at home. Or
perhaps--and watching them I began to think that this was so--they would
rather have liked to be looked at by those of the painters who were not
their fathers. Anyhow, they danced and laughed and called to each other,
often glancing back inquiringly at the cliffs; and indeed they were very
pretty in their little scarlet suits in the sapphire frame of the sea.

I sat there long after the girls were clothed and transformed into quite
uninteresting young women, and had gone their way noisily up the grass
slope into the shadows of the beeches. The afternoon stillness was left
to itself again, undisturbed by anything louder than the slow ripple of
the water round the base of the rocks. Sometimes a rabbit scuttled up
the side of the cliff, and once a hawk cried somewhere up among the
little clouds. The shadows grew very long; the shadows of the rocks on
the water looked as though they would stretch across to Thiessow before
the sun had done with them. Out at sea, far away beyond the hazy
headland, a long streak of smoke hung above the track where a steamer
had passed on the way to Russia. I wish I could fill my soul with enough
of the serenity of such afternoons to keep it sweet for ever.

Vilm consists of two wooded hills joined together by a long, narrow,
flat strip of land. This strip, beyond the meadow and its fringing
trees, is covered with coarse grass and stones and little shells. Clumps
of wild fruit trees scattered about it here and there look as if they
knew what roughing it is like. The sea washes