THE ROBBERIES OF THE SEA 421 



headlong upon it, flattening its fibres, but extract- 

 ing a perceptible amount of its solubles in the back- 

 wash. Another grinds it into the shingle, another 

 sprinkles it with little stones; then one, sweeping 

 along the shore, takes it in flank and rushes it down 

 into the trough, where the rest of its disintegration is 

 invisibly undertaken. 



A few yards beyond, the waves are washing off 

 a deeper soil from a layer of pudding-stone richly 

 dyed with iron, the pebbles, loosely mortared as they 

 are, resisting attrition considerably more than their 

 covering. Next to this the little cliff rises sheer, or 

 rather overhangs, where the sea pelts the rock with 

 shingle, grinding it off according to the varying resist- 

 ance of its strata, and driving a cave deep under its 

 base, as though for an instrument on which to play 

 a resounding tune. For centuries this bit of coast 

 has been thus steadily ground down. Far out, at the 

 low-tide mark and beyond it, the fossil forest testifies 

 to the fact that once the annual commercial damage 

 was still heavier than it is no\v. All along the cliffs 

 behind us, cracks near the edge tell of further depreda- 

 tions almost infallibly marked out. The owner of a 

 mile of this foreshore soon loses an acre to the sea, or 

 to the more fortunate owner of some other ocean 

 frontage. A few years ago, the sea was steadily 

 gnawing into the railway track a little to the west 

 of where we sit, and at high tide a big wave would 

 sometimes hurl shingle on the passing trains. The 

 company saw to the stopping of this advance. A 

 groin or two judiciously placed turned erosion into 

 accretion. The obliging sea, to which the necessary 

 magic word had been spoken, now piles up tons of 



