84 MEDUSA. 



half awake, q[uite unlike the " fast-living" people that 

 one is accustomed to see in these days. Two or three 

 sailors lounging in as many of the little stone-porches, 

 a superannuated fisherman with palsied fingers weav- 

 ing a mat of spunyam, a little girl with pitcher on 

 her shoulder going for water to the brook, and a 

 woman or two half up the steep, and almost over the 

 houses, hanging out clothes, made up about the sum 

 total of the moving population. 



Indications of the habits and doings of the village, 

 however, there were. At every second door nets were 

 hung out to dry ; and pieces of water-logged timber, 

 splintered and torn by tempests, collections of rusty 

 nails and iron-work, crumpled sheets of green copper, 

 old blocks, and fragments of cordage, were heaped up 

 beneath the windows, or lay in the porticoes at every 

 turn. Fishing and wrecking were evidently the cha- 

 racteristic means of living here. 



I walked along the margin of the shore, where the 

 transparent wavelets of the wide, horizonless sea 

 were washing the pebbles, and producing a constant 

 succession of whispering cadences, that fell musically, 

 the voices of the many-sounding sea. Medusae, by 

 scores, were washed up, the common Aurelia aurita, 

 lying helpless on the shingle like cakes of jelly, each 

 marked with four rings of purple. These were the 

 first Acalephs I had seen this season, and well pleased 

 I was to see them. 



Wearisome walking it is over the pebbly beach ; 

 the loose stones give away beneath the tread, and at 

 every step the foot sinks in above the shoe-top. How 

 wonderful to reflect that, with such an apparently 



