to the landscape, and its bright lawn broken by grey rocks and sprinkled with spots of smooth, shining colour by browsing cattle, “kingly-coated,” to borrow Meredith’s true word.
Last of all, far, far below all these brinks and descents of leaves and tree-tops and rock—Ah, this it is that gives the scene its unsurpassable attraction—nine hundred feet below, and so sheer down that it looks as if these pebbles at our feet could be kicked straight into it, there lies, like a jewel deep-set, a narrow gulf, a long inlet of water: a cool blue arm of the sea, thrust softly up into the bosom of these green and grassy hills. Smooth as satin, there it sleeps, and smiles. Its seaward extremity is three or four miles away, and cannot be seen from here; but right below us, see, is its landward end, its hand, as it were—a rounded gully-palm, all gentle with grass, curved about a crescent of gleaming sand, and holding in its hollow a little settlement of low red roofs, cuddled down among tufts of trees, and with a single line of Lombardy poplars seeming to coax it, right down, to the water’s edge. How picturesque it looks—and oh, how comfortably small and human, among all these immensities of hills and sky!
Do you see, besides, the wooden wharf that runs out into the water? That is where the coastal steamer ties up once or twice a week, and at the same time ties the settlement to the mainland; and it is worth a look on its own account, too. At close quarters, it is nothing but a rough and clumsy affair, none too clean, more than a little crazy; but, from this height, and in the fresh glory of this morning, magic clothes it! It is all
