HOPE'S NOSE. 243 



season or two conceals the damage, and a few years 

 repair it ; and then the shrubs and the briers grow 

 up around the hard-featured intruders, and the 

 creepers and ivy embrace them, and gradually en- 

 velop their rugged sides and angles, till the inter- 

 twining tendrils meet above, and the evergreen 

 drapery presents a continuous surface as before. 

 Already the work is half achieved ; and by and by 

 not a sign will be seen externally of what seemed at 

 the time horrid and incurable wounds. 



But there is a line where the vegetation ends, and 

 gazing down from this steep, the eye at length comes 

 to a broad belt of ruined rocks ; fragments wild and 

 ghastly, of all rude shapes and of all dimensions. 

 These, too, have been dislodged from above, and, 

 unlike their more favoured fellows, have plunged 

 beyond the region of shrub and brier, ploughing 

 their wild way through all, and there they lie in 

 chaotic confusion, heaped on one another, without a 

 leaf or blade of verdure to break the bald blackness 

 of that broad belt of ruined boulders. It is truly a 

 " line of confusion, and stones of emptiness ! " 



The tide is in. The encroaching sea insinuates 

 itself among the masses, rising and falling, and 

 seething up through the crevices, and closing over 

 the broad surfaces, the next moment to fall in green 

 cascades over every side, or covering the black rock 

 with sheets of pale blue and white foam, and tossing 

 around wreaths of feathery spray over the peaks, or 

 shooting up through some narrow crevice a tall jet 



