Where the Atlantic meets the land

BY CALDWELL LIPSETT
BOSTON: ROBERTS BROS, 1896 LONDON: JOHN LANE, VIGO ST.

Copyright, 1896, BY ROBERTS BROTHERS.
All Rights Reserved.
University Press: JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A.
DEDICATED TO MY DEAREST MOTHER.
CONTENTS

Bella Sweeny and Terry Gallagher had a holiday, and were spending it upon the rocks at Kilcross. He was a groom and she was a maid at 'the big house,' some miles inland, and this was her first visit to the place. He had been there several times before, and was doing the honors of the scenery. They had been 'coortin'' for some time, and he sat with his arm round her waist, in silence for the most part, punctuated by occasional references to the local names for heads of the landscape: he kept severely to facts, with the practical mind of the peasant class from which he sprang.
The point at which they found themselves was the innermost end of the long line of black-faced cliffs, where the rocky strata suddenly ceased and gave way to the sandy lowlands. The rock upon which they were seated was a single flat slab, which extended a hundred yards into the sea, forming a natural breakwater for the little cove behind them. To their right there stretched inland a couple of miles of yellow glistening strand, which merged gradually in the tufted bent-grass and rounded hillocks of the dunes which sloped to meet it at high-water mark. At the furthest point of sight in this direction the rocky strata cropped up again in the shape of an immense reef which stretched out half a mile into the sea, and now at low tide lay like a gigantic alligator on the surface of the water. When the tide was full its jagged points were completely covered, and only a thread of surf was left to warn the fisherman of its hidden dangers.