arm them; poor people's children must be dirty--why not?
Look on fifty yards to the left. Between two ridges of high pebble
bank, some twenty yards apart, comes Alva river rushing to the sea.
On the opposite ridge, a low white house, with three or four white
canvas-covered boats, and a flag-staff with sloping cross-yard,
betokens the coast-guard station. Beyond it rise black jagged cliffs;
mile after mile of iron-bound wall; and here and there, at the glens'
mouths, great banks and denes of shifting sand. In front of it, upon
the beach, are half-a-dozen great green and grey heaps of Welsh
limestone; behind it, at the cliff foot, is the lime-kiln, with its
white dusty heaps, and brown dusty men, its quivering mirage of hot
air, its strings of patient hay-nibbling donkeys, which look as
if they had just awakened out of a flour bin. Above, a green down
stretches up to bright yellow furze-crofts far aloft. Behind a reedy
marsh, covered with red cattle, paves the valley till it closes in;
the steep sides of the hills are clothed in oak and ash covert, in
which, three months ago, you could have shot more cocks in one day
than you would in Berkshire in a year. Pleasant little glimpses there
are, too, of grey stone farm-houses, nestling among sycamore and
beech; bright-green meadows, alder-fringed; squares of rich red
fallow-field, parted by lines of golden furze; all cut out with a
peculiar blackness, and clearness, soft and tender withal, which
betokens a climate surcharged with rain. Only in the very bosom of
the valley, a soft mist hangs, increasing the sense of distance, and
softening back one hill and wood behind another, till the great brown
moor which backs it all seems to rise out of the empty air. For a
thousand feet it ranges up, in rude sheets of brown heather, and grey
cairns and screes of granite, all sharp and black-edged against the
pale blue sky; and all suddenly cut off above by one long horizontal
line of dark grey cloud, which seems to hang there motionless, and yet
is growing to windward, and dying to leeward, for ever rushing out of
the invisible into sight, and into the invisible again, at railroad
speed. Out of nothing the moor rises, and into nothing it ascends,--a
great dark phantom between earth and sky, boding rain and howling
tempest, and perhaps fearful wreck--for the groundswell moans and
thunders on the beach behind us, louder and louder every moment.

Let us go on, and up the street, after we ha