The Tunnel Runners 



THE deep copper-red channel of the little 

 tidal river wound inland through the 

 wide yellowish levels of the salt marsh. 

 Along each side of the channel, between the 

 waving fringes of the grass and the line of 

 usual high tide, ran a margin of pale yellowish- 

 brown sand-flats, baked and seamed with 

 sun-cracks, scurfed with wavy deposits of 

 salt, and spotted with meagre tufts of sea- 

 green samphire, goose-tongue, and sea-rose- 

 mary. Just at the edge of the grass-fringe 

 an old post, weather-beaten and time- 

 eaten, stood up a solitary sentinel over the 

 waste, reminder of a time when this point of 

 the river had been a little haven for fishing- 

 boats a haven long since filled up by the 

 caprice of the inexorable silt. 



Some forty or fifty paces straight back 

 from the mouldering post, a low spur of 

 upland, darkly wooded with spruce and fir, 



