This house is at the beginning of the famous Cliff Drive that rounds the lighthouse at the point and stretches away for miles above the ever-changing, now beautiful, now sublime, and always great Pacific, that rolls its six thousand miles of billows toward us from Hong Kong.  Occasionally the road must be set back, and once the lighthouse was moved back from the cliffs, eaten away by the edacious tooth of the sea.

As Emerson says, “I never count the hours I spend in wandering by the sea; like God it useth me.”  There is a wideness like his mercy, a power like his omnipotence, a persistence like his patience, a length of work like his eternity.

The rocks of Santa Cruz, as in many other places, were laid in regular order, like the leaves of a book on its side.  But by various forces they have been crumbled, some torn out, and in many places piled together.  These layers, beginning at the bottom, are as follows; (1) igneous granite, unstratified; (2) limestone laid down from life in the ocean, metamorphosed by heat and all fossils thereby destroyed; (3) limestone highly crystallized, composed of fossil shells and very hard; (4) sandstone, made under the sea from previous rock powdered, having huge concretionary masses with a shell or a pebble as a nucleus around which the concretion has taken place; (5) shale from the sea also; (6) conglomerate, or drift, deposited by ice in the famous glacial cold snap; (7) alluvium soil deposited in fresh water and composed partly of organic matter.  In our second illustration some of these layers, or strata, may be distinguished.

[Illustration:  The Work and the Worker, Santa Cruz, Cal.]

When the awful blows of the sea smite the rock, if it finds a place less hard than others, it wears into it a slight depression, after half a hundred thousand strokes, more or less, and ever after, as the years go by, it drives its wedges home in that place.  A shallow cave results.  Then the waters converge on the sides of the cave and meet with awful force in the middle.  Thus a tunnel is excavated, like a drift in a mine, each wave making the tremendous charge and the reflowing surges bringing away all the detritus.  This tunnel may be driven or excavated two hundred feet inland, under the shore.  At each inrush of the wave the air is terribly condensed before it.  It seeks outlet.  And so it happens that the air is driven up through some crack in the rock and the superincumbent earth, one or two hundred feet from the shore, and a great hole appears in the ground from twenty to seventy feet deep.  Then the water spouts fiercely up and returning carries back the earth and broken rock into the sea.