he Doctor, who, snuggled in his sleeping-bag,
emitted an occasional snore--echoes from the Land of Nod. W---- and
our Boy of ten summers, on their canvas folding-cots, were peacefully
oblivious of the noises of the night, and needed the kiss of dawn to
rouse them. But for me, always a light sleeper, and as yet unused to
our airy bedroom, the crickets chirruped through the long watches.

Two or three freighters passed in the night, with monotonous
swish-swish and swelling wake. It arouses something akin to awe, this
passage of a steamer's wake upon the beach, a dozen feet from the door
of one's tent. First, the water is sucked down, leaving for a moment
a wet streak of sand or gravel, a dozen feet in width; in quick
succession come heavy, booming waves, running at an acute angle with
the shore, breaking at once into angry foam, and wasting themselves
far up on the strand, for a few moments making bedlam with any
driftwood which chances to have made lodgment there. When suddenly
awakened by this boisterous turmoil, the first thought is that a dam
has broken and a flood is at hand; but, by the time you rise upon your
elbow, the scurrying uproar lessens, and gradually dies away along a
more distant shore.

We were slow in getting off this morning. But the dense fog had
been loath to lift; and at first the stove smoked badly, until
we discovered and removed the source of trouble. This stove is an
ingenious contrivance of the Doctor's--a box of sheet-iron, of slight
weight, so arranged as to be folded into an incredibly small space;
a vast improvement for cooking purposes over an open camp-fire, which
Pilgrim's crew know, from long experience in far distant fields, to be
a vexation to eyes and soul.

Coaling hamlets more or less deserted were frequent this
morning--unpainted, windowless, ragged wrecks. At the inhabited mining
villages, either close to the strand or well up on hillside ledges,
idle men were everywhere about. Women and boys and girls were
stockingless and shoeless, and often dirty to a degree. But,
when conversed with, we found them independent, respectful, and
self-respecting folk. Occasionally I would, for the mere sake of
meeting these workaday brothers of ours, with canteen slung on
shoulder, climb the steep flight of stairs cut in the clay bank, and
on reaching the terrace inquire for drinking water, talking familiarly
with the folk who came to meet me at the well-curb.

There are old-fashioned Dutch