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Many of the roads in that country lay along the sea-beach, and were liable to be flooded by the tides, which rise with great height, and advance with extreme rapidity. Others were intersected with creeks and small inlets, which it was only safe to pass at particular times of the tide. Neither circumstance would have suited a dark night, a fatigued horse, and a traveller ignorant of his road.
Snow covered every housetop, and hung in ponderous masses from their edges, as if it were about to fall; but it never fell it hung there in the same position day after day, unmelted, unchanged. Snow covered the whole land, and the frozen river, the swamps, the sea-beach, and the sea itself, as far as the eye could reach, seemed like a pure white carpet.
The city was full of them, their camps were set upon the sea-beach and for miles around; there was no room at the inns or in the private houses, where guests slept upon the roofs, the couches, the floors, and in the gardens.
Both White Town and Black Town lay directly along the sea-beach, and the coming and going of the Company's ships were momentous events. Surf-boats used to land on the beach outside the 'Sea-Gate' of the wave-splashed Fort, laden with cargo from the Company's ships lying out in the roads; and the bales were carried through the gateway into the Company's warehouses within the Fort-walls.
The others of our party, having breakfasted until well after two, sought a house where Llewellyn was known. McHenry and I followed the road which circles the island by the lagoon and sea-beach. In that twelve leagues there are a succession of dales, ravines, falls precipices, and brooks, as picturesque as the landscape of a dream.
To stay indefinitely where he was would have proved an impossibility, and amid the confusion necessary to the shipping of his army, how could he have protected himself by six demi-cannon placed on the sea-beach?
Shutting himself in his chamber, he brooded over his crime; or, no longer able to endure the agony he felt, he would rush forth, and walk for hours over the sand-dunes, or along the sea-beach. But no answer of peace followed his prayers, and the voices of nature soothed him not. He thought his sin unpardonable at least, he would not pardon himself.
No one could have gone beyond that point, without either walking straight into the water, or keeping along the strip of sea-beach, upwards or downwards. The fugitives could not have escaped in either way, unless they had taken to the water and committed suicide by drowning themselves. Up the coast or down it they would have been seen to a certainty.
If we are walking on a sea-beach to-day, we do not look for animals that haunt the forests or roam over the open plains, or for those that live in sheltered valleys or in inland regions or on mountain-heights.
Our best room in here has a polished little mahogany tea-table, and six mahogany chairs, with claw talons grasping balls; the white sanded floor is crinkled in curious little waves, like those on the sea-beach; and right across the corner stands the "buffet," as it is called, with its transparent glass doors, wherein are displayed the solemn appurtenances of company tea-table.
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