all wild creatures, but especially with those of water
and air. A gull is not reckoned an especially graceful bird, but yonder
I see one, snowy white, that has come to fish in this safe lagoon, and
it dips and rises on its errands as lightly as a butterfly or a
swallow. Beneath that neighboring causeway the water-rats run over the
stones, lithe and eager and alert, the body carried low, the head
raised now and then like a hound's, the tail curving gracefully and
aiding the poise; now they are running to the water as if to drink, now
racing for dear life along the edge, now fairly swimming, then devoting
an interval to reflection, like squirrels, then again searching over a
pile of sea-weed and selecting some especial tuft, which is carried,
with long, sinuous leaps, to the unseen nest. Indeed, man himself is
graceful in his unconscious and direct employments: the poise of a
fisherman, for instance, the play of his arm, the cast of his line or
net,--these take the eye as do the stealthy movements of the hunter,
the fine attitudes of the wood-chopper, the grasp of the sailor on the
helm. A haystack and a boat are always picturesque objects, and so are
the men who are at work to build or use them. So is yonder stake-net,
glistening in the noonday light,--the innumerable meshes drooping in
soft arches from the high stakes, and the line of floats stretching
shoreward, like tiny stepping-stones; two or three row-boats are
gathered round it, with fishermen in red or blue shirts, while one
white sail-boat hovers near. And I have looked down on our beach in
spring, at sunset, and watched them drawing nets for the young herring,
when the rough men looked as graceful as the nets they drew, and the
horseman who directed might have been Redgauntlet on the Solway Sands.

I suppose it is from this look of natural fitness that a windmill is
always such an appropriate object by the sea-shore. It is simply a
four-masted schooner, stranded on a hill-top, and adapting itself to a
new sphere of duty. It can have needed but a slight stretch of
invention in some seaman to combine these lofty vans, and throw over
them a few remodelled sails. The principle of their motion is that by
which a vessel beats to windward; the miller spreads or reefs his
sails, like a sailor,--reducing them in a high wind to a mere
"pigeon-wing" as it is called, two or three feet in length, or in some
cases even scudding under bare poles. The whole structure vibrates a