i 9 4 AUGUST 



concrete which the hooves of galloping horses or the keel 

 of a char-a-voiles scarcely dint. The tides and currents 

 play strangely selective pranks. They fill one bay with 

 shells, another with pebbles. They sort the shingle, as 

 it had passed through a grading machine, on the Chesil 

 Bank. They will pile delicious sand over a series of years 

 against the south side of the Solent ; and then caprici 

 ously snatch it away again and leave behind unlovely 

 mud and &quot; slipper &quot; clay. They mix the rubble of rocks 

 and of shells in proportions peculiar to each particular 

 bay, so that you may know (with the farmers in the Duchy 

 of Cornwall) just what proportion of silica and lime you 

 will get from the sand carted to the fields. And the tides 

 are eccentric in themselves for all their absurd obedience 

 to the moon and adhesion ito the twenty-three-hour day. 

 They are double, here and there, and single, and may have 

 interpolated checks and advances only known to local 

 folk and given local names. Their eccentricity defeats 

 even the birds, as you may see pitiably whether on the 

 Blakeney Spit or the shingle beds in Jura. Should the 

 moon and wind be in alliance, the common boundaries 

 are exceeded, and when the waters abate, the line of the 

 tide-mark is a medley of the eggs of tern and gull and 

 plover as barren as the torn weeds or cases of the skate s 

 or whelk s eggs or the dead things that the gulls scavenge. 



Proverb-makers may assert the pleasure of sunshine 

 after rain -post pluvias serena ; but it is not greater than 

 the pleasure of rain after sunshine. Rain in Palestine 

 touches a deeper poetry than sunshine in England ; and 

 perhaps because we are a country of &quot; mists and mellow 

 fruitfulness &quot; in the common, we tire sooner than other 



