30 THE CALL OF THE SEA 



not a sign of man or of beast ; not even the bark 

 of a dog, that wholesome signal of human occupa- 

 tion, falls on your ear. The world seems like a 

 house from which the inhabitants have gone out 

 and locked the door behind them, and left you to 

 look in through the windows at the empty roorps. 

 The silence is broken only by the crying of the 

 gulls and by the lap of the waves on the shore. 

 They come marching in from the sunset line from 

 the cold, restless desert of the ocean, reminding 

 the solitary watcher of the one ultimate solution 

 of all human problems. For the ocean is the one 

 great living thing in all this solitary prospect, the 

 thing that was from the beginning and will always 

 be ; it alone, with its wrinkled inscrutable face and 

 mysterious respirations, is an earnest of the things 

 that go on. What wonder if the peasant, standing 

 amid the ruin of human industry on its margin, 

 should regard it as the separating barrier between 

 him and the world } Enemy and avenger though 

 it be, the track of the sunset across it seems the 

 one escape from it, the one pathway to hope and 

 the fulfilment of life. What wonder if he also 

 should " long to tread that golden path of rays," 

 and believe that it must indeed lead him to some 

 brighter destiny? 



Filso7i Youtig. 



