Claude and I are taking our last walk together along the
deer-park cliffs. Lundy is shrouded in the great grey fan of dappled
haze which streams up from the westward, dimming the sickly sun.
'There is not a breath the blue wave to curl.' Yet lo! round
Chapman's Head creeps a huge bank of polished swell, and bursts in
thunder on the cliffs.--Another follows, and another.--The Atlantic
gales are sending in their avant-courriers of ground-swell: six
hours more, and the storm which has been sweeping over 'the still-
vexed Bermoothes,' and bending the tall palms on West Indian isles,
will be roaring through the oak woods of Devon. The old black buck
is calling his does with ominous croakings, and leading the way
slowly into the deepest coverts of the glens. The stormy petrels,
driven in from the Atlantic, are skimming like black swallows over
the bay beneath us. Long strings of sea-fowl are flagging on
steadily at railroad pace, towards the sands and salt-marshes of
Braunton. The herring-boats are hastily hauling their nets--you may
see the fish sparkling like flakes of silver as they come up over the
gunwale; all craft, large and small, are making for the shelter of
the pier.
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