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Evan MacIan coming bounding back across the sand-heaps breathless, without his cap and keeping the sword in his hand only by a habit now quite hardened. "Take care, Turnbull," he cried out from a good distance as he ran, "I've seen a native." "A native?" repeated his companion, whose scenery had of late been chiefly of shellfish, "what the deuce! Do you mean an oyster?"
Day after day, night after night, that gorgeous pageant passed over the poor hermit's head without a sound; and though sun and moon and planet might change their places as the year rolled round, the earth beneath his feet seemed not to change. Every morning he saw the same peaks in the distance, the same rocks, the same sand-heaps around his feet. He never heard the tinkle of a running stream.
There was a priest called Stein, who dwelt at Isledale-river, in Bard-dale; he was good at husbandry and rich in beasts; his son was Kiartan, a brisk man and a well grown. Thorstein the White was the name of him who dwelt at Sand-heaps, south of Isledale-river; his wife was called Steinvor, a young woman and merry-hearted, and children they had, who were young in those days.
And there is something even more ghastly in being lost below the broad heavens in the open face of day than 'in the close covert of innumerous boughs. The monotonous swells of the sand-heaps, the weary expanse stretching right away to the horizon, no land-marks but the bleaching bones of former victims, the gigantic sameness, the useless light streaming down, and in the centre one tiny, black speck toiling vainly, rushing madly hither and thither a lost man till he desperately flings himself down and lets death bury him, that is the one picture suggested by the text.
Our knowledge of the mode of their first accumulation is derived from observation of the action of wind and water in the few instances where, with or without the aid of man, new coast dunes have been accumulated, and of the influence of wind alone in elevating new sand-heaps inland of the coast tier, when the outer rows are destroyed by the sea, as also when the sodded surface of ancient sands has been broken, and the subjacent strata laid open to the air.
Now men deemed they could see that these evil wights had wrought the loss of the men there in the dale; nor had folk hurt ever after from aught haunting the valley, and Grettir was thought to have done great deeds for the cleansing of the land. So the priest laid those bones in earth in the churchyard. But Grettir abode at Sand-heaps the winter long, and was hidden there from all the world.
Miss Wiggin tells us that indirectly we owe the children's sand-heaps in the public parks to Froebel, since these were the result of a suggestion made by Frau Schrader to the Empress Frederick, and the idea was carried out during her husband's too brief reign.
"Go away, go away, oh, hard-hearted knight, Go away to glory and fame; If you ever come back You'll not find me slack To change my state and name!" Much relieved by the impromptu expressions of her feelings, she turned from the window, Saint George having disappeared among the distant sand-heaps, and went to attend her honoured sire at his matutinal meal.
"You thought you was hid, and so you come back to this town to stick your head in one of its sand-heaps. I tell you, Jim, I ain't been very strong on the p'int of a Providence directing our ways. It's always seemed to me like a blind force pushing us from behind. But I'm getting converted.
The Spaniards fired the first gun, and then the New York took up a position between two batteries and delivered broadsides right and left. Then the Puritan's big guns came into play, and then the Cincinnati poured a stream of shells into the forts. It did not take long to knock the Spanish defences into sand-heaps only about half an hour and then the American ships stood out to sea.
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