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The forest, so far as Captain Redwood had explored it, seemed altogether untenanted by living creature. He had now been tramping for upwards of an hour among the trees without seeing either bird or quadruped. And although there were fish in the stream, and should have been shell-fish along the sea-beach, neither Murtagh nor Saloo had succeeded in procuring any.
Here they lie, the quintessential relics of those little Eocene fishes and other sea beasts, if such they were, that swam and crawled about the waters many years ago piled up on terraces so high that the mind grows dizzy at contemplating their multitudes, or the ages required to squeeze them into this priceless powder; piled up for 500 miles along their old sea-beach an arid inland chain of hills, nowadays, where hardly a blade of grass will grow; sterile themselves, the cause of surpassing fertility elsewhere.
It is true that one of the small ironclads had about got the range of the advancing enemy along the sea-beach, so making their position rather precarious, but I believe that the real cause of the failure was the action of the horses.
Yonder, in those dingy habitations, and shops of red herring and tobacco-pipes, where men have not yet quite declared for the Devil; there, I say, is land: here is mere sea-beach. Thither go with your benevolence, thither to those dingy caverns of the poor; and there instruct and drill and manage, there where some fruit may come from it.
And this was the last courtesy, of all his noble bounties, which Timon showed to mankind, and this the last sight of him which his countrymen had, for not many days after, a poor soldier, passing by the sea-beach which was at a little distance from the woods which Timon frequented, found a tomb on the verge of the sea, with an inscription upon it purporting that it was the grave of Timon the man-hater, who "While he lived, did hate all living men, and, dying, wished a plague might consume all caitiffs left!"
On the sea-beach, in the camp of the Tamaseses, the solitude was near as great; he saw three or four men smoking before the British consulate, perhaps a dozen in all; the rest were behind in the bush upon their line of forts. About the midst he sat down, and here a woman drew near to him. The moon shone in her face, and he knew her for a householder near by, and a partisan of Mataafa's.
This they had done by glancing occasionally to the ground, where shoe tracks in the soft sand, three sets of them, leading to and fro, were sufficient evidence that the three mids must have gone back to the embouchure of the ravine; and thither emerged upon the open sea-beach. Where were they now?
This building adjoined to the custom-house established at that little seaport, and both were situated so close to the sea-beach that it was necessary to defend the back part with a large and strong rampart or bulwark of huge stones, disposed in a slope towards the surf, which often reached and broke upon them.
There need only be some mention of sunshine or rain among the leaves, green trees, or wind-swept grass, the yellow sea-beach or the vast sea-depths, and his imagination flames and flares. His best music was written when he was appealed to throughout a long work as "The Tempest" in this manner.
"There is an awfully ingenious little spell I can show you, if you happen to have a telephone book and a compass and a toad's heart and a hair from a black goat's beard about you. Or again, if you stand on a sea-beach at low tide on Christmas night with the moon at your back and a wax candle in your left hand, and write upon the sand the name by the way, who is it you want to find?"
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