The increasing light showed that he was a young man still, perhaps
about thirty --a young man with a strong and resolute face and
a square forehead. He stood under the veranda watching, as he had
done every day for two years or more. the break of day and the
sunrise. He drank in the delicious breeze, cooled by a thousand
miles and more of ocean. No one knows the freshness and sweetness
of the air until he has so stood in the open and watched the dawn
of a day in the tropics. He went back to the house, and came out
again clad in a rough suit of tweeds and a helmet. His servant
was waiting for him with his morning tea. He drank it, and sallied
forth. By this time the short-lived splendour of the east was fast
broadening to right and left, until it stretched from pole to a pole.
Suddenly the sun leaped up and the colours fled and the splendour
vanished. The sky became all over a deep, clear blue, and round
about the sun was a brightness which no eye but that of the sea-bird
can face and live. The man in the helmet turned to the sea-shore,
and walked briskly along the natural mound or sea-wall. Now and
then he stepped down upon the white coral sand, picked up a shell,
looked at it, and threw it away.
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