table-manger, door-scraper, and garden-stile. Anne gained the
summit, and followed along the central track over the huge lump of
freestone which forms the peninsula, the wide sea prospect extending as
she went on. Weary with her journey, she approached the extreme
southerly peak of rock, and gazed from the cliff at Portland Bill, or
Beal, as it was in those days more correctly called.

The wild, herbless, weather-worn promontory was quite a solitude, and,
saving the one old lighthouse about fifty yards up the slope, scarce a
mark was visible to show that humanity had ever been near the spot. Anne
found herself a seat on a stone, and swept with her eyes the tremulous
expanse of water around her that seemed to utter a ceaseless
unintelligible incantation. Out of the three hundred and sixty degrees
of her complete horizon two hundred and fifty were covered by waves, the
coup d'oeil including the area of troubled waters known as the Race,
where two seas met to effect the destruction of such vessels as could not
be mastered by one. She counted the craft within her view: there were
five; no, there were only four; no, there were seven, some of the specks
having resolved themselves into two. They were all small coasters, and
kept well within sight of land.

Anne sank into a reverie. Then she heard a slight noise on her left
hand, and turning beheld an old sailor, who had approached with a glass.
He was levelling it over the sea in a direction to the south-east, and
somewhat removed from that in which her own eyes had been wandering. Anne
moved a few steps thitherward, so as to unclose to her view a deeper
sweep on that side, and by this discovered a ship of far larger size than
any which had yet dotted the main before her. Its sails were for the
most part new and clean, and in comparison with its rapid progress before
the wind the small brigs and ketches seemed standing still. Upon this
striking object the old man's glass was bent.

'What do you see, sailor?' she asked.

'Almost nothing,' he answered. 'My sight is so gone off lately that
things, one and all, be but a November mist to me. And yet I fain would
see to-day. I am looking for the Victory.'

'Why,' she said quickly.

'I have a son aboard her. He's one of three from these parts. There's
the captain, there's my son Ned, and there's young Loveday of
Overcombe--he that lately joined.'

'Shall I look for you?' said Anne, after a pause.

'Certainly,