elds or some port where a cargo of coal can be picked up. They are
plunging heavily, and every moment their bows seem to go down too far
to recover.

On mornings when the sea is quieter there are few who can resist the
desire to plunge into the blue waters, for at seven o'clock the shore is
so entirely deserted that one seems to be bathing from some primeval
shore where no other forms of life may be expected than some giant
crustaceans. This thought, perhaps, prompted the painful sensations I
allowed to prey upon me one night when I was walking along this
particular piece of shore from Whitby. I had decided to save time over
the road to Sandsend by getting on to the beach at Upgang, where the
lifeboat-house stands, by the entrance to a small beck. So dark was the
night that I could scarcely be sure that I had not lost my way, until I
had carefully felt the walls of the boat-house. Then I stepped
cautiously on to the sand, which I discovered as soon as my feet began
sinking at every step.

The harbour lights of Whitby were bright enough, but in the other
direction I could be sure of nothing. At first I seemed to have made a
mistake as to the state of the tide, for there appeared to be a
whiteness nearly up to the base of the cliffs; but this proved to be the
suffused glow from the lighthouses. Rain had been falling heavily for
the last few days, and had produced so many wide streams across the sand
that my knowledge of the usual ones merely hampered me. At first I began
stepping carefully over large black hollows in the sand, and then a
great black mark would show itself, which, offering no resistance to my
stick as I drew it across its surface, I could only imagine to be caused
by a flood of ink poured upon the beach by some horrible squid. My
musings on whether sea-monsters did ever disport themselves on the shore
under the cover of sufficiently dark nights would be broken into by
discovering that I had plunged into a stream of undiscoverable
dimensions, whose existence only revealed itself by the splash of my
boots. Retreating cautiously, I would take a run, and then a terrific
leap into the darkness, sometimes finding myself on firm dry sand, and
as frequently in the water.

I had decided that I should probably not reach Sandsend until daylight,
when a red lamp near the railway-bridge shone out as a beacon, and I
realized that I would soon be safe from the tentacles of sea-monsters.

When I awoke next morning, I