The country to which I refer was a level and treeless plateau, over which the winds cut like a whip.  For miles on miles it was the same.  A river, indeed, fell into the sea near the town where I resided; but the valley of the river was shallow and bald, for as far up as ever I had the heart to follow it.  There were roads, certainly, but roads that had no beauty or interest; for, as there was no timber, and but little irregularity of surface, you saw your whole walk exposed to you from the beginning:  there was nothing left to fancy, nothing to expect, nothing to see by the wayside, save here and there an unhomely-looking homestead, and here and there a solitary, spectacled stone-breaker;[12] and you were only accompanied, as you went doggedly forward by the gaunt telegraph-posts and the hum of the resonant wires in the keen sea-wind.  To one who has learned to know their song in warm pleasant places by the Mediterranean, it seemed to taunt the country, and make it still bleaker by suggested contrast.  Even the waste places by the side of the road were not, as Hawthorne liked to put it, “taken back to Nature” by any decent covering of vegetation.  Wherever the land had the chance, it seemed to lie fallow.  There is a certain tawny nudity of the South, bare sunburnt plains, coloured like a lion, and hills clothed only in the blue transparent air; but this was of another description—­this was the nakedness of the North; the earth seemed to know that it was naked, and was ashamed and cold.[13]

It seemed to be always blowing on that coast.  Indeed, this had passed into the speech of the inhabitants, and they saluted each other when they met with “Breezy, breezy,” instead of the customary “Fine day” of farther south.  These continual winds were not like the harvest breeze, that just keeps an equable pressure against your face as you walk, and serves to set all the trees talking over your head, or bring round you the smell of the wet surface of the country after a shower.  They were of the bitter, hard, persistent sort, that interferes with sight and respiration, and makes the eyes sore.  Even such winds as these have their own merit in proper time and place.  It is pleasant to see them brandish great masses of shadow.  And what a power they have over the colour of the world!  How they ruffle the solid woodlands in their passage, and make them shudder and whiten like a single willow!  There is nothing more vertiginous than a wind like this among the woods, with all its sights and noises; and the effect gets between some painters and their sober eyesight, so that, even when the rest of their picture is calm, the foliage is coloured like foliage in a gale.[14] There was nothing, however, of this sort to be noticed in a country where there were no trees and hardly any shadows, save the passive shadows and clouds or those of rigid houses and walls.  But the wind was nevertheless an occasion of pleasure; for nowhere could you taste more fully the pleasure