While at dinner, on the evening of our arrival, I kept looking from the
window, of course, and I saw before me, first a little bit of garden,
mostly in turf, then a low stone wall; beyond, over the top of the wall,
the blue water of the bay; then beyond the water, all alive with light and
motion, the rocks and sand-hills of the opposite side of the little bay,
not a quarter of a mile across. I could likewise see where the shore went
sweeping out and away to the north, with rock after rock standing far into
the water, as if gazing over the awful wild, where there was nothing to
break the deathly waste between Cornwall and Newfoundland. But for the
moment I did not regard the huge power lying outside so much as the merry
blue bay between me and those rocks and sand-hills. If I moved my head a
little to the right, I saw, over the top of the low wall already mentioned,
and apparently quite close to it the slender yellow masts of a schooner,
her mainsail hanging loose from the gaff, whose peak was lowered. We must,
I thought, be on the very harbour-quay. When I went out for my walk with
Wynnie, I had turned from the bay, and gone to the brow of the cliffs
overhanging the open sea on our own side of it.
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