i8o ALONGSHORE iv 



at anchor than to run in with a load of nets and 

 herrings against a steep cop, and have the boat 

 swamped before she can be hauled out of the 

 water.) Breezes, calms, and land winds leave the 

 beach in cops, the lowest of them marking the 

 height of the last tide. Neap-tides in settled 

 weather, shortening daily, leave each a small cop, 

 which is smoothed out again when the spring- 

 tides lengthen and rise. But a gale of wind from 

 the sea, which carries the pebbles alongshore 

 almost as if they were snowflakes drifting, and 

 shifts incalculable tons of shingle — that leaves the 

 beach smoothest of all. It makes a clean sweep, 

 and should it be from the west of south, blowing 

 up-channel with the flood, it bares the shore right 

 down to its marly foundations. Old wooden 

 stakes, rounded and rotten, come back to light: 

 like blackened heads they are, and they give one 

 a feeling that the old times are staring at us out 

 of the beach in which long ago they were buried. 

 The larger pebbles vanish, swept along and cov- 

 ered over with small. All the shore is left with a 

 surface of gritty shingle, caked together near the 

 foot of it with hard black mud. 



That is the beachcombers' chance. Fishermen 

 themselves, usually contemptuous of beachcombers, 



