For an instant he thought of turning back into the more frequented thoroughfare; but the hum of voices, and increasing tread of feet, seemed too suggestive of discovery, and he stumbled onwards, in faint hope of reaching the dwelling of some obscure barber-surgeon who might staunch his wounds, and send for a coach to take him home.
Twice he reeled against the wall of a certain dark passage, called Deadman's Alley, down which he staggered with uneven steps, and had almost decided that he must sink into the gutter, and lie where he fell till a passer-by should pick him up, when he descried a red lamp in a window ahead, and summoned all his strength to make for it as his last hope. Half blind, half stupefied, he groped and blundered on, with a dull, strange fancy that he was on the deck of a ship, labouring in a heavy sea while she made for a harbour-light, that seemed continually to dip and disappear behind the waves. The illusion, though not so vivid, was similar to a dream, and the languor that accompanied it something akin to sleep; till in a moment, while through his brain there came a whirr as in the works of a watch when it runs down, the light widened, broke into a hundred shafts of fire, went out and all was dark.
High-water in Porlock Bay. The tide upon the turn--sand-pipers, great and small, dipping, nodding, stalking to and fro, or flitting along its margin waiting for the ebb; a gull riding smoothly outside on an untroubled surface, calm as the soft sky overhead, that smiled lovingly down on the Severn Sea. Landward, a strip of green and level meadows, fringed by luxuriant woodlands, fair with the gorgeous hues of summer; stalwart oak, towering elm, spreading walnut, stately Spanish chestnut, hardy mountain ash, and scattered high on the steep, above dotted thorns and spreading hazels, outposts, as it were, of delicate feathering birches, to guard the borders of the forest and the waste; fairyland brought here to upper earth, with all its changing phases, and variety of splendour. The wild-bird from her nest in Horner Woods needed but a dozen strokes of her wing to reach the open moorland that stretched and widened ridge by ridge, and shoulder by shoulder, till its rich carpet of heather was lost in the warm haze that came down on Dunkerry Beacon, like a veil from the sky.