However, my punishment came at last. The coast, which is yielding
gradually to the sea, is famous for sudden and gigantic landslips.
These landslips are sometimes followed, at the return of the tide, by
a further fall, called a 'settlement.' The word 'settlement' explains
itself, perhaps. No matter how smooth the sea, the return of the tide
seems on that coast to have a strange magnetic power upon the land,
and the debris of a landslip will sometimes, though not always,
respond to it by again falling and settling into new and permanent
shapes.

Now, on the morning after a great landslip, when the coastguard,
returning on his beat, found a cove where, half-an-hour before, he
had left his own cabbages growing, I, in spite of all warnings, had
climbed the heap of _débris_ from the sands, and while I was
hallooing triumphantly to two companions below--the two most
impudent-looking urchins, bare-footed and unkempt, that ever a
gentleman's son forgathered with--a great mass of loose earth
settled, carrying me with it in its fall. I was taken up for dead.

It was, however, only a matter of broken ribs and a damaged leg. And
there is no doubt that if the local surgeon had not been allowed to
have his own way, I should soon have been cured. As it was I became a
cripple. The great central fact--the very pivot upon which all the
wheels of my life have since been turning--is that for two years
during the impressionable period of childhood I walked with crutches.

It must not be supposed that my tears--the tears which at this moment
were blotting out the light and glory of the North Sea in the
sun--came from the pain I was suffering. They came from certain