THE SEA-SHORE AFTER A STORM. 265 



most interesting sight, every stone and smallest bit of sea-weed 

 covered with millions of periwinkles at all stages of growth. It is 

 to a scene of this kind that the poet refers, and very happily we 

 think : " the peri winkled shore " is a thousand times better than 

 the "barren, barren shore" of Tennyson. No one objects to 

 " daisied mead " or "daisied lea," and " periwinkled shore," as we 

 have seen it, and as hundreds, we make no doubt, of our readers 

 have also seen it, is, to our thinking, every whit as poetical, and in 

 no sense inconsistent even with epic dignity. Wilks having with- 

 in recent years become an article of considerable marketable value, 

 being carefully gathered on every beach, the " periwinkled shore " 

 of Ossian is, of course, a rarer sight now-a-days than it used to be. 

 Nearly as plentiful on our shores as the common periwinkle itself 

 is its first cousin, the Purpura lapillus of conchologists, or yellow 

 periwinkle, one of those creatures that furnished the famous purple 

 dye of the ancients. It has a bitter, astringent taste, and is in 

 consequence not eaten like its congener, the wilk. We have said 

 that our favourite morning walk is invariably, if we can accomplish 

 it, along the sea-beach ; and hardly a day passes but we can show 

 something interesting and new, picked up in these our littoral 

 perambulations. After a storm particularly, we endeavour, what- 

 ever our other engagements, to devote an hour at least to a ramble 

 along the shore, and it is rarely we return empty-handed : some 

 curious waif or other, cast up by the storm, seldom fails to be 

 forthcoming as the reward of our matutinal diligence. After a 

 severe gale one morning last week, we found a dead kittiwake, but 

 perfectly plump and fresh, lying on the top of a mass of drift 

 tangle. The bird itself was no great rarity, for the kittiwake 

 (Lprus rissa, Linn.), a very pretty little gull, is common on all 

 our shores, even in winter. The curious thing was that, on taking 

 up the bird in our hand, we found that one of its feet was firmly 

 held in the vice-like grasp of a large mussel, the mussel in its turn 



