A WOOD BY THE SEA 59 



fishers, or toilers in the sands, returning before dark ; 

 men and boys in big boots and heavy wet clothes, 

 burdened with spades and forks and baskets of bait 

 and shell-fish. With slow, heavy feet they trudge 

 past and leave the world to darkness and to me. 



On one of these evenings as I stood on the ridge 

 of the dunes, looking seaward, when the tide was out 

 and the level sands stretched away to the darkening 

 horizon, an elderly woman made her appearance, and 

 had evidently come all that way down to give her dog 

 an evening run. Climbing over the ridge, she went 

 down to the beach, where the dog, a big rough-haired 

 terrier, was so delighted with the smooth sands that he 

 began careering round her in wide circles at his utmost 

 speed, barking the while with furious joy. The 

 sound produced an extraordinary effect ; it was re- 

 peated and redoubled a hundred-fold from all over 

 the flat sands. It was my first experience of an echo 

 of that sort heard from above — perhaps if I had been 

 below there would have been no echo — but I could 

 not understand how it was produced. It was not 

 like other echoes — exact repetitions of the sounds 

 emitted which come back to us from walls and woods 

 and cliffs — but was fainter and more diffused, the 

 sounds running into each other and all seeming to 

 run over the flat earth, now here, now there, and fading 

 into mysterious whisperings. It was as if the vigorous 

 barkings of the living dog had roused the ghosts of 

 scores and hundreds of perished ones ; that they 

 had come out of the earth and, unable to resist the 



