so Star anfr Meatber Gossip 



A very Proteus is the sun this shivering November 

 morning. At one moment it becomes so faintly 

 nebulous as to convince you that the fog is intent on 

 swallowing it up for the day ; at the next moment it 

 reappears in determinate shape, looking down with 

 blanched face upon the whitened world beneath. 



Looming close at hand is a ghostly little lighthouse, 

 and just as ghostly a little village, whose long sea front 

 has an odd mixture of delightfully quaint cottages 

 and very modern hotels and residences. It was gay 

 with holiday-makers during the past summer, but the 

 first blast of the October gales blew them back to 

 their inland homes, and this morning it is left to the 

 melancholy of the brooding mist. 



The tide is out, and as you walk along the dimly 

 gleaming beach there falls on your ear the mournful 

 moan of the sea. At times, a deep-toned boom ! boom ! 

 mingles solemnly with the sea's murmuring. Whence 

 does it come ? Sounds are so difficult to locate on 

 mornings such as these. There it is again, boom ! 

 boom ! in dolorous, trembling cadences, as though it 

 were the knell of some poor, drowned sailor. 



Were you out in the bay, at the extreme limit of the 

 dreaded Longscar Reef, you would see a large bell- 

 buoy swinging sullenly with the motion of the swell. 

 That is whence this intermittent tolling comes. During 

 hard gales the buoy is sometimes torn from its moor- 

 ings and cast ashore. I have seen it thus, a very 

 bruised and battered semblance of its former self ; its 

 sepulchral voice silenced. The mariners miss its voice, 

 and on the Reef that lies out bay wards, like a gigantic 

 sea-monster stranded, disaster befalls them. There is 

 a certain secluded corner in the churchyard of that 



