The dark
opening of the night was now a glowing invitation to the day. He shook
off his wraps and crawled out into the open.
And what an open!
He drew deep breaths of delight at the magnificence of his outlook--its
vastness, its spaciousness, its wholesome amplitude and loneliness. He
felt like a new man born solitary into a new world.
The sky, without a cloud, was like a mighty hollowed sapphire, in which
blazed the clear white sun; and the vast plain of the sea, sweeping away
into infinity, was a still deeper blue, with here and there long swathes
of green, and here and there swift-speeding ruffles purple-black.
A brisk easterly breeze set all the face of it a-ripple, and where the
dancing wavelets caught the sun it glanced and gleamed like sheets of
molten silver.
"A silver sea! A silver sea!" he cried aloud, and into his mind there
flashed an incongruous comparison of the bountifulness of Nature's
silver with the pitiful grains they hacked out of her rocks with such
toil and hardship.
Away to the south across the silver sea the Jersey cliffs shone clear in
the sunshine, and on the dimpling plain between, the black Paternosters
looked so like the sails of boats heading for Sark that he remembered
suddenly that he was in hiding, and dropped to cover alongside the great
stones of his shelter.
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