mischief, would drop burning twigs on thatched roofs.  Nor that magic bird, the fulmar, a wanderer from the Scottish archipelago, dropping from his bill an oil which the islanders used to burn in their lamps.  Nor do you ever find in the evening, in the plash of the ebbing tide, that ancient, legendary neitse, with the feet of a hog and the bleat of a calf.  The tide no longer throws up the whiskered seal, with its curled ears and sharp jaws, dragging itself along on its nailless paws.  On that Portland—­nowadays so changed as scarcely to be recognized—­the absence of forests precluded nightingales; but now the falcon, the swan, and the wild goose have fled.  The sheep of Portland, nowadays, are fat and have fine wool; the few scattered ewes, which nibbled the salt grass there two centuries ago, were small and tough and coarse in the fleece, as became Celtic flocks brought there by garlic-eating shepherds, who lived to a hundred, and who, at the distance of half a mile, could pierce a cuirass with their yard-long arrows.  Uncultivated land makes coarse wool.  The Chesil of to-day resembles in no particular the Chesil of the past, so much has it been disturbed by man and by those furious winds which gnaw the very stones.

At present this tongue of land bears a railway, terminating in a pretty square of houses, called Chesilton, and there is a Portland station.  Railway carriages roll where seals used to crawl.

The Isthmus of Portland two hundred years ago was a back of sand, with a vertebral spine of rock.

The child’s danger changed its form.  What he had had to fear in the descent was falling to the bottom of the precipice; in the isthmus, it was falling into the holes.  After dealing with the precipice, he must deal with the pitfalls.  Everything on the sea-shore is a trap—­the rock is slippery, the strand is quicksand.  Resting-places are but snares.  It is walking on ice which may suddenly crack and yawn with a fissure, through which you disappear.  The ocean has false stages below, like a well-arranged theatre.

The long backbone of granite, from which fall away both slopes of the isthmus, is awkward of access.  It is difficult to find there what, in scene-shifters’ language, are termed practicables.  Man has no hospitality to hope for from the ocean; from the rock no more than from the wave.  The sea is provident for the bird and the fish alone.  Isthmuses are especially naked and rugged; the wave, which wears and mines them on either side, reduces them to the simplest form.  Everywhere there were sharp relief ridges, cuttings, frightful fragments of torn stone, yawning with many points, like the jaws of a shark; breaknecks of wet moss, rapid slopes of rock ending in the sea.  Whosoever undertakes to pass over an isthmus meets at every step misshapen blocks, as large as houses, in the forms of shin-bones, shoulder-blades, and thigh-bones, the hideous anatomy of dismembered rocks.  It is not without reason that these striae of the sea-shore are called cotes.[9]