beautiful white cows. The children, too, especially
the girls, some almost as tall as their large mothers, though still in
short frocks, were very fine. The one pastime of these was paddling, and
it was a delight to see their bare feet and legs. The legs of those
who had been longest on the spot--probably several weeks in some
instances--were of a deep nutty brown hue suffused with pink; after
these a gradation of colour, light brown tinged with buff, pinkish buff
and cream, like the Gloire de Dijon rose; and so on to the delicate
tender pink of the clover blossom; and, finally, the purest ivory
white of the latest arrivals whose skins had not yet been caressed and
coloured by sun and wind.

How beautiful are the feet of these girls by the sea who bring us glad
tidings of a better time to come and the day of a nobler courage, a
freer larger life when garments which have long oppressed and hindered
shall have been cast away! It was, as I have said, mere chance which had
brought so many persons of a particular type together on this occasion,
and I thought I might go there year after year and never see the like
again. As a fact I did return when August came round and found a crowd
of a different character. The type was there but did not predominate:
it was no longer the herd of beautiful white and strawberry cows with
golden horns and large placid eyes. Nothing in fact was the same, for
when I looked for the swifts there were no more than about twenty birds
instead of over a hundred, and although just on the eve of departure
they were not behaving in the same excited manner.

Probably I should not have thought so much about that particular crowd
in that tempestuous August, and remembered it so vividly, but for the
presence of three persons in it and the strange contrast they made to
the large white type I have described. These were a woman and her two
little girls, aged about eight and ten respectively, but very small for
their years. She was a little black haired and black-eyed woman with a
pale sad dark face, on which some great grief or tragedy had left its
shadow; very quiet and subdued in her manner; she would sit on a chair
on the beach when the weather permitted, a book on her knees, while her
two little ones played about, chasing and flying from the waves, or
with the aid of their long poles vaulting from rock to rock. They
were dressed in black frocks and scarlet blouses, which set off their
beautiful small dark