58 THE BANK A COO UNTANT. 



That decent-looking elderly man was Donald Miller. 

 Bat his toil was all in vain. Again came winter and 

 the storms ; again had he betaken himself to his bed, 

 for his third bulwark had gone the way of the two 

 others. With a resolution truly indomitable he rose 

 yet again, and erected a fourth bulwark, which has 

 now presented an unbroken front to the storms of 

 twenty years. 



' Though Donald had never studied mathematics as 

 taught in books or the schools, he was a profound 

 mathematician notwithstanding. Experience had taught 

 him the superiority of the sloping to the perpendicular 

 wall in resisting the waves ; and he set himself to dis- 

 cover that particular angle which, without being incon- 

 veniently low, resists them best. Every new bulwark 

 w r as a new experiment made on principles which he had 

 discovered in the long nights of winter, when, hanging 

 over the fire, he converted the hearth-stone into a tablet, 

 and, with a pencil of charcoal, scribbled it over with 

 diagrams. But he could never get the sea to join issue 

 with him by charging in the line of his angles ; for, 

 however deep he sunk his foundations, his insidious 

 enemy contrived to get under them by washing away 

 the beach ; and then the whole wall tumbled into the 

 cavity. Now, however, he had discovered a remedy. 

 First he laid a row of large flat stones on their edges in 

 the line of the foundation, and paved the whole of the 

 beach below until it presented the appearance of a 

 sloping street, taking care that his pavement, by run- 

 ning in a steeper angle than the shore, should at its 

 lower edge, base itself in the sand. Then, from the fla^ 

 stones which formed the upper boundary of the pave- 

 ment, he built a ponderous wall which, ascending in the 

 proper angle, rose to the level of the garden, and a neat 



