d Biscay have
the delight of fine linen shirts, bleached in the dew. Their thresholds
and their windows teem with faces fair and fresh, laughing under
garlands of maize; a joyous and proud serenity shines out in their
ingenious arts, in their trades, in their customs, in the dress of their
maidens, in their songs. The mountain, that colossal ruin, is all aglow
in Biscay: the sun's rays go in and out of every break. The wild
Jaizquivel is full of idylls. Biscay is Pyrenean grace as Savoy is
Alpine grace. The dangerous bays--the neighbours of St. Sebastian, Leso,
and Fontarabia--with storms, with clouds, with spray flying over the
capes, with the rages of the waves and the winds, with terror, with
uproar, mingle boat-women crowned with roses. He who has seen the Basque
country wishes to see it again. It is the blessed land. Two harvests a
year; villages resonant and gay; a stately poverty; all Sunday the sound
of guitars, dancing, castanets, love-making; houses clean and bright;
storks in the belfries.

Let us return to Portland--that rugged mountain in the sea.

The peninsula of Portland, looked at geometrically, presents the
appearance of a bird's head, of which the bill is turned towards the
ocean, the back of the head towards Weymouth; the isthmus is its neck.

Portland, greatly to the sacrifice of its wildness, exists now but for
trade. The coasts of Portland were discovered by quarrymen and
plasterers towards the middle of the seventeenth century. Since that
period what is called Roman cement has been made of the Portland
stone--a useful industry, enriching the district, and disfiguring the
bay. Two hundred years ago these coasts were eaten away as a cliff;
to-day, as a quarry. The pick bites meanly, the wave grandly; hence a
diminution of beauty. To the magnificent ravages of the ocean have
succeeded the measured strokes of men. These measured strokes have
worked away the creek where the Biscay hooker was moored. To find any
vestige of the little anchorage, now destroyed, the eastern side of the
peninsula should be searched, towards the point beyond Folly Pier and
Dirdle Pier, beyond Wakeham even, between the place called Church Hope
and the place called Southwell.

The creek, walled in on all sides by precipices higher than its width,
was minute by minute becoming more overshadowed by evening. The misty
gloom, usual at twilight, became thicker; it was like a growth of
darkness at the bottom of a well. The open