About dusk I found myself some distance
away from the village, near the great bridge that spans the river where
it debouches into the sea. The water was heaving in long, slow swells.
A deep silence had fallen over the earth. The evening red was reflected
in the sea in rich blood dye, while the colored lights of the bridge
and the lighthouse glowed and burned in the deep, here writhing along
the waves like long golden and crimson sea-serpents, and there shooting
down long streamers of light into the waves, to serve, I fancied, as
hanging lamps for that vast black, star-bespangled abyss of the sky,
that weird sunken dome, that inverted world, over which the water lay
stretched out like thin, translucent red glass, and to look down into
whose immeasurable and dizzy depths thrilled me both with pleasure and
a kind of terror--that vague feeling of pain which the sublime always
excites in the mind.
I crossed the bridge and wandered along the opposite side of the river
by a lonely path. Suddenly I saw smoke curling up from a small recess
of the beach. It was a full mile from any human habitation known to me,
and I hesitated for a moment about advancing upon such a place at dusk,
especially as the winter was one of the gloomiest in the period of our
long financial depression.
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