At what an extraordinary rate the waves rushed up the shore, fast galloping after one another, accomplishing their fates!  There is only one line I know that tells well of their rate, that glory of Swinburne:—­

  Where the dove dipped her wing and the oars won their way,
  Where the narrowing Symplegades whiten the straits of Propontis
    with spray.

III

At Osipovka, where I spent a whole long summer day sitting on a log on the seashore, I saw a vision of the sea and nymphs—­a party of peasant girls came down and bathed.  They were very pretty and frolicsome, taking to the water in a very different style from educated women.  They were boisterous and wild.  They went into the sea backwards, and let the great waves knock them down; they lay down and were buffeted by the surf; they ran about the shore, sang, shouted, yelled, waved their arms; they dived headlong into the waves, swam hand over hand among them, pulled one another by the legs.  The sea does not know how to play games:  it seemed like an ogre with his twelve princesses.  They made sport of him, pulled his beard and his hair, tempted and evaded him, mocked him when he grabbed at them, befooled him when he captured them.  I used to have an idea of nymphs behaving very artistically with really drawing-room manners, but I saw I was wrong.  Nymphs are only artistic and alluring singly—­one nymph on a rock before a gallant prince.

In numbers they are absolutely wild and have no manners at all.  Lucky old ogre, to possess twelve such princesses, I thought; but as I looked at the gleam of their limbs as they mocked, and heard their hard laughter, I found him to be but a pitiable old greybeard, for he looked at beauty that he could scarce comprehend and never possess.  The beauty of life has power greater than the beauty of the sea.

IV

One night after I had made my bed on a grassy sand-bank above the sea and was waiting, in the thrilling and breathless twilight, to fall asleep, I suddenly heard a sound as of a child weeping somewhere.  My heart bounded in horror.  I lay scarce daring to breathe, and then when there was silence again, looked up and down the shore for the person who had cried.  But I saw no one.  I listened—­listened, expecting to hear the cry again, but only the waves turned the stones, broke, rolled up, and turned the stones again.  Evening crept over the sea, and the waves looked dark and shadowy; the silence grew more intense.  I turned on one side to go to sleep, and then once more came a sad, despairing human cry as of a lost child.  I sat bolt upright and looked about me, and even then, whilst I stared, the cry came again, and from the sea.  “Is it possible there is a child down by the waves?” I thought, and I tried to distinguish some little human shape in the darkness that seemed hastening on the shoulders of the incoming waves.  There came a terrible wail and another silence.  I dared not go and search, but I lay and shuddered and felt terribly lonely.  The waves followed one another and followed again, ever faster and faster as it seemed in the darkness—­