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I was the first to break the silence.

‘Claude, well-beloved, will you not sketch a little?’

No answer.

‘Not even rhapsodize? call it “lovely, exquisite, grand, majestic”? There are plenty of such words in worldlings’ mouths–not a Cockney but would burst out with some enthusiastic commonplace at such a sight–surely one or other of them must be appropriate.’

‘Silence, profane! and take me away from this. Let us go down, and hide our stupidities among those sand-hills, and so forget the whole. What use standing here to be maddened by this tantalizing earth- spirit, who shows us such glorious things, and will not tell us what they mean?’

So down we went upon the burrows, among the sands, which hid from us every object but their own chaotic curves and mounds. Above, a hundred skylarks made the air ring with carollings; strange and gaudy plants flecked the waste round us; and insects without number whirred over our heads, or hung poised with their wings outspread on the tall stalks of marram grass. All at once a cloud hid the sun, and a summer whirlwind, presage of the thunderstorm, swept past us, carrying up with it a column of dry sand, and rattling the dry bents over our heads.

‘What a chill, doleful sigh comes from those reeds!’ said Claude. ‘I can conceive this desert, beneath a driving winter’s sky instead of this burning azure, one of the most desolate places on the earth.’

‘Ay, desolate enough,’ I said, as we walked down beyond the tide- mark, over the vast fields of ribbed and splashy sands, ‘when the dead shells are rolling and crawling up the beach in wreaths before the gale, with a ghastly rattle as of the dry bones in the “Valley of Vision,” and when not a flower shows on that sandcliff, which is now one broad bed of yellow, scarlet, and azure.’

‘That is the first spot in England,’ said Claude, ‘except, of course, “the meads of golden king-cups,” where I have seen wild flowers give a tone to the colouring of the whole landscape, as they are said to do in the prairies of Texas. And look how flowers and cliff are both glowing in a warm green haze, like that of Cuyp’s wonderful sandcliff picture in the Dulwich Gallery,–wonderful, as I think, and true, let some critics revile it as much as they will.’

‘Strange, that you should have quoted that picture here; its curious resemblance to this very place first awoke in me, years ago, a living interest in landscape-painting. But look there; even in these grand summer days there is a sight before us sad enough. There are the ribs of some ill-fated ship, a man-of-war too, as the story goes, standing like black fangs, half-buried in the sand. And off what are those two ravens rising, stirring up with their obscene wings a sickly, putrescent odour? A corpse?’

No, it was not a corpse; but the token of many corpses. A fragment of some ship; its gay green paint and half-effaced gilding contrasting mockingly with the long ugly feathered barnacle-shells, which clustered on it, rotting into slime beneath the sun, and torn and scattered by the greedy beaks of the ravens.

In what tropic tornado, or on what coral-key of the Bahamas, months ago, to judge by those barnacles, had that tall ship gone down? How long had that scrap of wreck gone wandering down the Gulf Stream, from Newfoundland into the Mid-Atlantic, and hitherward on its homeless voyage toward the Spitzbergen shore? And who were all those living men who “went down to Hades, even many stalwart souls of heroes,” to give no sign until the sea shall render up her dead? And every one of them had a father and mother–a wife, perhaps, and children, waiting for him–at least a whole human life, childhood, boyhood, manhood, in him. All those years of toil and education, to get him so far on his life-voyage; and here is the end thereof!’