s necessary for travelling. But Tardif began
to teach me that, and also to mend fishing-nets, which I persevered in,
though the twine cut my fingers. Could I by any means make myself useful
to them?

As the spring came on, half my dullness vanished. Sark was more
beautiful in its cliff scenery than any thing I had ever seen, or could
have imagined. Why cannot I describe it to you? I have but to close my
eyes, and my memory paints it for me in my brain, with its innumerable
islets engirdling it, as if to ward off its busy, indefatigable enemy,
the sea. The long, sunken reefs, lying below the water at high tide, but
at the ebb stretching like fortifications about it, as if to make of it
a sure stronghold in the sea. The strange architecture and carving of
the rocks, with faces and crowned heads but half obliterated upon them;
the lofty arches, with columns of fretwork bearing them; the pinnacles,
and sharp spires; the fallen masses heaped against the base of the
cliffs, covered with seaweed, and worn out of all form, yet looking like
the fragments of some great temple, with its treasures of sculpture; and
about them all the clear, lucid water swelling and tossing, throwing
over them sparkling sheets of foam. And the brilliant tone of the golden
and saffron lichens, and the delicate tint of the gray and silvery ones,
stealing about the bosses and angles and curves of the rocks, as if the
rain and the wind and the frost had spent their whole power there to
produce artistic effects. I say my memory paints it again for me; but it
is only a memory, a shadow that my mind sees; and how can I describe to
you a shadow? When words are but phantoms themselves, how can I use them
to set forth a phantom?

Whenever the grandeur of the cliffs had wearied me, as one grows weary
sometimes of too long and too close a study of what is great, there was
a little, enclosed, quiet graveyard that lay in the very lap of the
island, where I could go for rest. It was a small patch of ground, a
God's acre, shut in on every side by high hedge-rows, which hid every
view from sight except that of the heavens brooding over it. Nothing was
to be seen but the long mossy mounds above the dead, and the great,
warm, sunny dome rising above them. Even the church was not there, for
it was built in another spot, and had a few graves of its own scattered
about it.

I was sitting there one evening in the early spring, after the sun had
dipped below the line of