I must now, if I am to bring you to "Two years ago," and to my story,
as it was told to me, ask you to follow me into the good old West
Country, and set you down at the back of an old harbour pier; thirty
feet of grey and brown boulders, spotted aloft with bright yellow
lichens, and black drops of tar, polished lower down by the surge of
centuries, and towards the foot of the wall roughened with crusts
of barnacles, and mussel-nests in crack and cranny, and festoons of
coarse dripping weed.

On a low rock at its foot, her back resting against the Cyclopean
wall, sits a young woman of eight-and-twenty, soberly, almost primly
dressed, with three or four tiny children clustering round her. In
front of them, on a narrow spit of sand between the rocks, a dozen
little girls are laughing, romping, and pattering about, turning the
stones for "shannies" and "bullies," and other luckless fish left by
the tide; while the party beneath the pier wall look steadfastly down
into a little rock-pool at their feet,--full of the pink and green
and purple cut-work of delicate weeds and coralline, and starred with
great sea-dahlias, crimson and brown and grey, and with the waving
snake-locks of the Cercus, pale blue, and rose-tipped like the fingers
of the dawn. One delicate Medusa is sliding across the pool, by slow
pantings of its crystal bell; and on it the eyes of the whole group
are fixed,--for it seems to be the subject of some story which the
village schoolmistress is finishing in a sweet, half-abstracted
voice,--

"And so the cruel soldier was changed into a great rough red starfish,
who goes about killing the poor mussels, while nobody loves him, or