It was a glorious sight upon a glorious day.  To the northward the glens rushed down toward the cliff, crowned with gray crags, and carpeted with purple heather and green fern; and from their feet stretched away to the westward the sapphire rollers of the vast Atlantic, crowned with a thousand crests of flying foam.  On their left hand, some ten miles to the south, stood out against the sky the purple wall of Hartland cliffs, sinking lower and lower as they trended away to the southward along the lonely ironbound shores of Cornwall, until they faded, dim and blue, into the blue horizon forty miles away.

The sky was flecked with clouds, which rushed toward them fast upon the roaring south-west wind; and the warm ocean-breeze swept up the cliffs, and whistled through the heather-bells, and howled in cranny and in crag,

     “Till the pillars and clefts of the granite
        Rang like a God-swept lyre;”

while Amyas, a proud smile upon his lips, stood breasting that genial stream of airy wine with swelling nostrils and fast-heaving chest, and seemed to drink in life from every gust.  All three were silent for awhile; and Jack and Cary, gazing downward with delight upon the glory and the grandeur of the sight, forgot for awhile that their companion saw it not.  Yet when they started sadly, and looked into his face, did he not see it?  So wide and eager were his eyes, so bright and calm his face, that they fancied for an instant that he was once more even as they.

A deep sigh undeceived them.  “I know it is all here—­the dear old sea, where I would live and die.  And my eyes feel for it; feel for it—­and cannot find it; never, never will find it again forever!  God’s will be done!”

“Do you say that?” asked Brimblecombe, eagerly.

“Why should I not?  Why have I been raving in hell-fire for I know not how many days, but to find out that, John Brimblecombe, thou better man than I?”

“Not that last:  but Amen!  Amen! and the Lord has indeed had mercy upon thee!” said Jack, through his honest tears.

“Amen!” said Amyas.  “Now set me where I can rest among the rocks without fear of falling—­for life is sweet still, even without eyes, friends—­and leave me to myself awhile.”

It was no easy matter to find a safe place; for from the foot of the crag the heathery turf slopes down all but upright, on one side to a cliff which overhangs a shoreless cove of deep dark sea, and on the other to an abyss even more hideous, where the solid rock has sunk away, and opened inland in the hillside a smooth-walled pit, some sixty feet square and some hundred and fifty in depth, aptly known then as now, as the Devil’s-limekiln; the mouth of which, as old wives say, was once closed by the Shutter-rock itself, till the fiend in malice hurled it into the sea, to be a pest to mariners.  A narrow and untrodden cavern at the bottom connects it with the outer sea; they could even then hear the mysterious thunder and gurgle of the surge in the subterranean adit, as it rolled huge boulders to and fro in darkness, and forced before it gusts of pent-up air.  It was a spot to curdle weak blood, and to make weak heads reel:  but all the fitter on that account for Amyas and his fancy.