ther rocks a huge conical stone stood with a
gull roosting on its top, and just as a person fixes on some object as
the limit of his walk she determined to go as far as this stone and then
turn back.

As she drew close to it the gull flapped its wings and flew away and she
saw that the thing was not a stone but the figure-head of a ship, the
form of a woman with ample breasts, broken and scarred by years of
weather and stained with the droppings of gulls. The arms were gone, but
the great face remained almost in its entirety staring away across the
sands and the sea.

It had once worn a crown, but the crown was broken away all but a little
bit on the left side of the head and it had an appearance of life that
almost daunted the girl as she stood looking, watching it, and listening
to the singing sound of the beach echoes and the mewing and crying of
the gulls.

Then as she moved closer her foot struck on something half buried in the
sand, it was a balk of timber, ships timber was all about, sanded over,
and in places half uncovered. Here was firewood enough for twenty years.
In the figure-head alone there was enough to supply their wants for a
long time to come.

She sat down to rest on a projecting piece of this timber near the
figure. Close up to it like this it lost its touch of life and became
simply a block of wood, and from this point she could see the beach over
which she had travelled stretching away and away to the Lizard Point
with the foam breaking around it and flown about by the never-resting
gulls.

She had come nearly three miles and she had found something worth
finding by just keeping on.

She remembered the spectre crab. It had nearly turned her back
empty-handed, but she had kept on and she registered that fact deeply in
her mind, dwelling on it with a pleasure she had never felt before.

Then she fell to thinking of the ship that all this belonged to and the
storm that must have driven it here. The weeds of the high tide mark did
not come within ten feet of the wreckage, so the waves must have come a
hundred feet or more beyond where she was sitting. Perhaps it was at
night with all this coast roaring in the darkness and the wind yelling
above the shouting of the waves. And all that must have happened years
ago, to judge by the work of the weather on the once gaily painted woman
and the depth the timbers had sunk in the sand.

She rose up, and before starting back she glanced inland towards