through the haze. Over the vast sea, here dark with shifting cloud-shadows, there still bright in the clear sunshine, are hues a painter might toil for in vain. Who could render the swift changes of colour that wind and sun are weaving with their magical loom over the wide expanse? Here a band of pale, clear green stretches far across the bay; here a belt of soft amber; there a long stretch of rich, imperial purple, with endless interchange of brown and green and blue, ruffled with light flaws of wind, and touched at far intervals with white points of foam, as of waves that were fleeing from the rougher sea outside.
The art of man might copy to the life the curve of that great green wave, with scraps of seaweed showing darkly through its cool, transparent depths; but not the deftest hand that ever drew could give the low roar of the incoming roller, the sound of its plunge on the unyielding rock. The painter might imitate the snowy whiteness of the water beaten suddenly into foam, but not its seething hiss as it rushes in among the boulders, not the rattle of the pebbles as the wave draws back for its next plunge along the beach. He might show us the glisten of the wet stones, rounded and polished by the eternal chafing of the surges; he might make the white foam flicker in the black shadows under them, but not the sullen sound of boulders shaken to their stony roots by the resistless tide—boulders that on rough nights of winter, when the lighthouse tower is veiled in storm-drift, and great waves are thundering on the bar, are hurled like play-things up and down the beach. The cormorant on the canvas might be to the full as stately and sombre as that dark figure yonder, brooding like some spirit of evil; but no shout could startle him to flight, driving him, with slow beat of his broad wings, to seek safety in some still more secluded resting-place. The clearest colours of the palette, the deftest touches of the brush, the highest ideal of the painter can give us but one glimpse of what after all is one unending change. His may be the ideal. This is the real, the restless, seething, stormy sea. What is the sea without its sound? As we gaze at the dumb fury of a painted storm—the fatal reef, the doomed ship, the white lash of the pitiless surges, it is to Fancy alone that we must look for
"The sound of the trampling surf
On the rocks and the hard sea sand."
But now the fishing-boats are coming in. Their brown sails, always so dear to the soul of the artist, have taken colour from the flaming west, and shine like fiery orange in the light of sunset. Their dark hulls are glistening with spray, the white foam shines like silver underneath their bows. One after one they near the shore, and as they pass into the shadow of the cliff the silver melts from the hissing foam below them, the borrowed colour fades slowly from their sails, that, as each craft reaches her moorings, rattle down, mere heaps of sombre, sea-beaten canvas. Boats are putting out from the shore to bring in the fish. Groups of idlers and fishing-folk gather on the quay. For the moment the hum of voices rises louder through the narrow street of the little town, half hidden now in the darkness of the hollow—the little town that is like no other in the islands.
"'Tis a stairway, not a street.
That ascends the deep ravine."
The sun is down. Far off across the bay the lighthouse has mounted guard over the bar—the very bar over which
"Three fishers went sailing away to the west,
Away to the west as the sun went down."
Now silence begins to settle on the village. The bearded vikings are gone from the seat where, night after night, they spin the same old yarns; where night after night the wayfarer over-hears scraps of seafaring talk—of prodigious hauls of fish, of hairbreadth escapes, of trawlers that, fleeing from a storm, were caught on the very threshold and dashed to flinders on the quay.
A sound of the sea is in it all. And when the last group of idlers has broken up, when the clatter of the last belated footsteps has died away up the little, unlighted, stony street, and the hush of night is brooding on this quaint old village, the song of the sea grows louder still. Now through the quiet air comes faintly up the cry of some wandering plover, the muttered croak of a solitary heron. All night the little town is full of voices of the sea—
"The grand, majestic symphonies of ocean.
THE VIKINGS SEAT.
toc
Half way down the one street of this "little wood-embosomed fishing town—a steep stair of houses clinging to the cliff," as Kingsley calls it, is one of the few level spaces that break the otherwise abrupt descent. No better place could have been chosen for a seat, for no point in all the village commands so wide a view of the sea. There is no place so good as this for watching the trawlers putting out, hauled slowly to the head of the quay, and then spreading their great brown mainsails—double-reefed of late, for there is mostly a stiff breeze outside the bay. On the left, in front of one of the prettiest of many pretty houses in the village, half covered with a bower of creepers, is a low wall, on which, when their day's work is done, the sailors and the old sea captains gather for their nightly gossip. Below are groups of cottages, scattered in picturesque confusion, with ancient roofs of crumbling slate, and quaint old gables, all wreathed in creepers and honeysuckle and tall fuchsias. Lower still is the old quay, five centuries old, with brown fishing nets hung up to dry, and with a half-score or so of trawlers moored to old corroded guns embedded in the masonry, their tall masts swaying idly on the long swell that now, at high tide, fills the little harbour. The fishermen are still busy over their gear. When all is stowed they will make their way up here, to the wall yonder, or to this bench, to talk over the doings of the day. Here the old captains, grey-headed, storm-beaten sea kings, sit, night after night, and spin over and over their well-worn yarns. There is not so much in their speech of
". . the magic charm of foreign lands,
With shadows of palms, and shining sands;"
not so much of the high seas,
"Of ships dismasted, that were hailed,
And sent no answer back again,"
as of disasters nearer home, of some mishap among the boats.
It is always the boats. The talk is ever and ever the same—of spars carried away, of split mainsails, of the failure of the fishing. A few days since the trawlers put out with a fair wind and a smooth sea. The trawls were not yet down when clouds swept off the land, the air was darkened by a great rush of rain, and a sudden storm, with heavy squalls of wind, broke over the boats. One by one the brown sails disappeared. On the quay stood a group of anxious figures vainly endeavouring to peer through the storm. When the weather cleared it was seen that one of the boats was in trouble. A squall had laid her on her beam ends, and she shipped a heavy sea. The men had given themselves up for lost, for no help could have got to them in time, even had their plight been seen; when, happily for them, the bowsprit carried away, some of the strain was taken off, and the boat righted. All next day her skipper was strolling idly on the quay, like a man dazed; and as you pass the Vikings' Seat in the evening, or indeed any little knot of sailors, you will still hear scraps of the story.
The gravestones round the church on the hill are evidence enough of the risks they run that go down to the sea in ships. More eloquent still are the tales of the old fishermen:—how, for instance, in one great storm, now "five-and-fifty years agone," as they put it, twenty-one men from this port were drowned in the bay, within sight of land. Still farther back, "a matter of one-and-seventy years agone," no fewer than thirty-two were lost; and the whole population
