was. As the long, dismal nights of winter set in, with the wind sweeping
across the island for several days together with a dreary, monotonous
moan which never ceased, I generally sat by their fire, for I had nobody
but Tardif to talk to; and now and then there arose an urgent need
within me to listen to some friendly voice, and to hear my own speaking
in reply. There were only two books in the house, the Bible and the
"Pilgrim's Progress," both of them in French; and I had not learned
French beyond the few phrases necessary for travelling. But Tardif began
to teach me that, and also to mend fishing-nets, which I persevered in,
though the twine cut my fingers. Could I by any means make myself useful
to them?

As the spring came on, half my dullness vanished. Sark was more
beautiful in its cliff scenery than any thing I had ever seen, or could
have imagined. Why cannot I describe it to you? I have but to close my
eyes, and my memory paints it for me in my brain, with its innumerable
islets engirdling it, as if to ward off its busy, indefatigable enemy,
the sea. The long, sunken reefs, lying below the water at high tide, but
at the ebb stretching like fortifications about it, as if to make of it
a sure stronghold in the sea. The strange architecture and carving of
the rocks, with faces and crowned heads but half obliterated upon them;
the lofty arches, with columns of fretwork bearing them; the pinnacles,
and sharp spires; the fallen masses heaped against the base of the
cliffs, covered with seaweed, and worn out of all form, yet looking like
the fragments of some great temple, with its treasures of sculpture; and
about them all the clear, lucid water swelling and tossing, throwing
over them sparkling sheets of foam. And the brilliant tone of the golden
and saffron lichens, and the delicate tint of the gray and silvery ones,
stealing about the bosses and angles and curves of the rocks, as if the
rain and the wind and the frost had spent their whole power there to