shered in by the word--

"Walter?"

"Anything more to frighten me with, Charlie?" he answered cheerily; "you
shan't succeed."

"Well, Walter," he answered, with a little touch of shame, "I was only
going to say that, if you look, you'll see that your oar's been broken,
and is only spliced together."

"I've seen it all along, Charlie, and will use the oar gingerly; and
now, Charlie, I see you're a little frightened, my boy. I'm going to
brace you up. Rest on your oar a minute."

He did so. "Now turn round and _look_."

He pointed with his finger to a dark figure, now distinctly seen,
cowering low at the white cliff's foot.

"O Walter, I'm ready; I won't say a word more;" and he leant to his oar,
and plied it like a man.

It is a pretty, a delightful thing, in idle summer-time to lie at full
length upon the beach on some ambrosial summer evening, when a glow
floats over the water, whose calm surface is tenderly rippled with gold
and blue. And while the children play beside you, dabbling and paddling
in the wavelets, and digging up the ridges of yellow sand, which take
the print of their pattering footsteps, nothing is more pleasant than to
let the transparent stream of the quiet tide plash musically with its
light and motion to your very feet; nothing more pleasant than to listen
to its silken murmurs, and to watch it flow upwards with its beneficent
coolness, and take possession of the shore. But it is a very different
thing when there rises behind you a wall of frowning cliff, precipitous,
inaccessible, affording no hope of refuge; and when, for the golden calm
of summer eventide, you have the cheerless drawing-in of a loud and
stormy February night; and when you have the furious hissing violence of
rock-and-wind-struck breakers for the violet-coloured margin of rippling
waves--knowing that the wind is wailing forth your requiem, and that,
with the fall of every breaker, unseen hands are ringing your knell of
death.

The boy crouched there, his face white as the cliffs above him, his
undried limbs almost powerless for cold, and his clothes wetted through
and through with spray--pushing aside every moment the dripping locks of
hair which the wind scattered over his forehead, that he might look with
hollow, staring eyes on the Death which was advancing towards him,
wrapping him already in its huge mantle-folds, calling aloud to him,
beckoning him, freezing him to the very bone with the touch of its icy
ha