box-seat; all three men in the Collector's livery of white and scarlet.
On a perch behind the vehicle--which, despite its weight, left but the
shallowest of wheel-ruts on the hard sand--sat Manasseh, the Collector's
cook and body-servant; a huge negro, in livery of the same white and
scarlet but with heavy adornments of bullion, a cockade in his hat, and
a loaded blunderbuss laid across his thighs. Last and alone within the
coach, with a wine-case for footstool, sat a five-year-old boy.

Master Dicky Vyell--the Collector's only child, and motherless--sat and
gazed out of the windows in a delicious terror. For hours that morning
the travellers had ploughed their way over a plain of blown sand, dotted
with shrub-oaks, bay-berries, and clumps of Indian grass; then, at a
point where the tall cliffs began, had wound down to the sea between
low foothills and a sedge-covered marsh criss-crossed by watercourses
that spread out here and there into lagoons. At the head of this
descent the Atlantic had come into sight, and all the way down its
echoes had grown in the boy's ears, confusing themselves with a
delicious odour which came in fact from the fields of sedge, though he
attributed it to the ocean.

But the sound had amounted to a loud humming at most; and it was with a
leap and a shout, as they rounded the last foothill and saw the vast
empty beach running northward before them, league upon league, that the
thunder of the surf broke on them. For a while the boom and crash of it
fairly stunned the child. He caught at an arm-strap hanging by the
window and held on with all his small might, while the world he knew
with its familiar protective boundaries fell away, melted, left him--a
speck of life ringed about with intolerable roaring emptiness.
To a companion, had there been one in the coach, he must have clung in
sheer terror; yes, even to his father, to whom he had never clung and