CHAPTEE VII. 



O the Barren, Barren Shore — Brilliant Auroral Display — Intense Cold — Birds — Glanders — 

 Scribblings on the Back of One Pound Notes. 



During a week's pleasant and gentle thaw [February 1870], we had 

 hoped that the worst of winter was come and gone ; hut to our no 

 small disappointment the genial interregnum has heen followed hy 

 another heavy fall of snow, and a wonderfully keen and biting frost, 

 which, borne on the wings- of a surly nor'easter, has again bound up 

 the earth as if with fetters of iron. Under such circumstances the 

 sea-coast, we take it, presents the most dreary and desolate-looking 

 winter picture imaginable ; far more so, to our thinking, than either 

 moss, or moorland, or mountain range. There is a something in- 

 expressibly dismal and doioie in the black crape-like belt of sea 

 beach which divides a landscape deeply clad with snow and frost- 

 bound, from the dull and leaden coloured deep beyond ; the dashing 

 of the waves of said deep upon the shore, uttering the while a 

 sadly funereal and dirge-like moan. If our inland friends, in view 

 of the wintry waste around them, take up the cry of " O the dreary, 

 dreary moorland" — we, dwellers by the sea coast, have the best 

 possible right to finish the Tennysonian line by exclaiming " the 

 barren, barren shore." It must, by the way, have been on some 

 fair summer eve that the Crown officials first thought of depriving 

 landowners of the sea-shore privileges hitherto enjoyed by them ; 

 had it been in winter, the idea, it strikes us, would have withered 

 in the bud ; they would have fled the very sight of the dark and 

 dreary " foreshore," and wisely confined themselves to the shelter 

 of their Woods and Forests ! 



