e the whole
Atlantic rushed in, tossing the seaweeds in his mane; at low tide he
rushed out, growling and gnashing his granite teeth. Between tides a
baby might play on the beach, digging with pebbles and shells, till it
lay asleep on the sand. The whole sun shone by day, troops of stars by
night, and the great moon in its season.

Into this grand cycle of the seaside day I came to live and learn and
play. A few people came with me, as I have already intimated; but the
main thing was that _I_ came to live on the edge of the sea--I, who
had spent my life inland, believing that the great waters of the world
were spread out before me in the Dvina. My idea of the human world had
grown enormously during the long journey; my idea of the earth had
expanded with every day at sea; my idea of the world outside the earth
now budded and swelled during my prolonged experience of the wide and
unobstructed heavens.

Not that I got any inkling of the conception of a multiple world. I
had had no lessons in cosmogony, and I had no spontaneous revelation
of the true position of the earth in the universe. For me, as for my
fathers, the sun set and rose, and I did not feel the earth rushing
through space. But I lay stretched out in the sun, my eyes level with
the sea, till I seemed to be absorbed bodily by the very materials of
the world around me; till I could not feel my hand as separate from
the warm sand in which it was buried. Or I crouched on the beach at
full moon, wondering, wondering, between the two splendors of the sky
and the sea. Or I ran out to meet the incoming storm, my face full in
the wind, my being a-tingle with an awesome delight to the tips of my
fog-matted locks flying behind; and stood clinging to some stake or
upturned boat, shaken by the roar and rumble of the waves. So
clinging, I pretended that I was in danger, and was deliciously
frightened; I held on with both hands, and shook my head, exulting in
the tumult around me, equally ready to laugh or sob. Or else I sat, on
the stillest days, with my back to the sea, not looking at all, but
just listening to the rustle of the waves on the sand; not thinking at
all, but just breathing with the sea.

Thus courting the influence of sea and sky and variable weather, I was
bound to have dreams, hints, imaginings. It was no more than this,
perhaps: that the world as I knew it was not large enough to contain
all that I saw and felt; that the thoughts that flashed through m