Six horses drew the coach, and to each pair of leaders rode a postillion, while a black coachman guided the wheelers from the box-seat; all three men in the Collector’s livery of white and scarlet.  On a perch behind the vehicle—­which, despite its weight, left but the shallowest of wheel-ruts on the hard sand—­sat Manasseh, the Collector’s cook and body-servant; a huge negro, in livery of the same white and scarlet but with heavy adornments of bullion, a cockade in his hat, and a loaded blunderbuss laid across his thighs.  Last and alone within the coach, with a wine-case for footstool, sat a five-year-old boy.

Master Dicky Vyell—­the Collector’s only child, and motherless—­sat and gazed out of the windows in a delicious terror.  For hours that morning the travellers had ploughed their way over a plain of blown sand, dotted with shrub-oaks, bay-berries, and clumps of Indian grass; then, at a point where the tall cliffs began, had wound down to the sea between low foothills and a sedge-covered marsh criss-crossed by watercourses that spread out here and there into lagoons.  At the head of this descent the Atlantic had come into sight, and all the way down its echoes had grown in the boy’s ears, confusing themselves with a delicious odour which came in fact from the fields of sedge, though he attributed it to the ocean.

But the sound had amounted to a loud humming at most; and it was with a leap and a shout, as they rounded the last foothill and saw the vast empty beach running northward before them, league upon league, that the thunder of the surf broke on them.  For a while the boom and crash of it fairly stunned the child.  He caught at an arm-strap hanging by the window and held on with all his small might, while the world he knew with its familiar protective boundaries fell away, melted, left him—­a speck of life ringed about with intolerable roaring emptiness.  To a companion, had there been one in the coach, he must have clung in sheer terror; yes, even to his father, to whom he had never clung and could scarcely imagine himself clinging.  But his father rode ahead, carelessly erect on his blood-horse—­horse and rider seen in a blur through the salt-encrusted glass.  Therefore Master Dicky held on as best he might to the arm-strap.

By degrees his terror drained away, though its ebb left him shivering.  Child though he was, he could not remember when he had not been curious about the sea.  In a dazed fashion he stared out upon the breakers.  The wind had died down after the tempest, but the Atlantic kept its agitation.  Meeting the shore (which hereabouts ran shallow for five or six hundred yards) it reared itself in ten-foot combers, rank stampeding on rank, until the sixth or seventh hurled itself far up the beach, spent itself in a long receding curve, and drained back to the foaming forces behind.  Their untiring onset fascinated Dicky; and now and again he tasted renewal of his terror, as a wave, taller than the rest or better