“And where did you hit that boy?”
“Aha!” said Walter, with a sort of spasmodic laugh, and a proud smile through his tears; “he was thirteen, but that didn’t help him, uncle. I blacked his eye, and as for what he got in the mouth, look here,” and he showed his knuckles, which were still bleeding.
“Sent him down, I hope.”
“He fell down and wouldn’t get up, and I kicked him soundly. I hope it wasn’t cowardly, uncle, to kick him when he was down, but it wasn’t my fault that he wouldn’t get up. A butcher said it was right,” added the boy, pensively and gravely.
A RUN UPON THE CHESIL BANK.
In a previous Number[1] we took occasion, while describing one of the chief breakwaters now in course of construction on our coasts, to advert briefly to the beach of the Isle of Portland, or, as it is locally named, the “Chesil Bank.” Those of our readers who did us the honour to make one of our party on that occasion will remember that we promised to give some additional details of this remarkable bank at a future time; may we hope they will not be disinclined to accompany us once more while we endeavour to fulfil our pledge?
Presuming, as in duty bound, the day to be fine and breezy, that we have left the little town of Weymouth some four miles behind us, given a parting glance at those very common objects of the shore with which all sea-side visitors and admirers of Mr. Leech are so well acquainted, paid our halfpenny at the “ferry-bridge” which unites the beach and the mainland, and crossing, we stand ancle-deep in small pebbles. Dismiss from your mind at once, dear reader, all your commonly received ideas of the general peculiarities of a beach if you would understand what this one is like; let Brighton, Hove, and Eastbourne fade from your recollection; banish Folkestone and Hastings, Ventnor and Sandown, from your thoughts: we tread no common pebbles. Before us is a steeply sloping wall of shingle rising some thirty feet above our heads, and, almost washing our feet; the calm ripple of Portland Roads breaks on this hither slope of the bank. Struggling with many slippings and sinkings to the summit, another sea stretches out before us, downwards towards which again the beach gently slopes. We stand upon a comparatively narrow isthmus of pebbles, the sea landlocked and quiet within, white, restless, and limitless without. At about a mile to our left the beach strikes the island of Portland, and is rapidly lost in its cliffs, while towards the right it trends away ten miles or more from where we stand, the grey brown tint of the stones about us gaining a ruddier hue as they recede, till in the middle distance the shingle looks like a long dull red line parting the blue and white water; gradually this too becomes more aërial and refined, till it is finally lost in a reddened haze on the view horizon.
Strolling as well as the nature of the ground will permit us towards Portland, we soon become aware of a sensible increase in the dimensions of the bank; its height and width become greater, and the pebbles larger and larger as we advance. In the opposite direction the reverse of this takes place; the beach dwindles slowly mile by mile, and we need only walk far enough to find the big stones dwarfed to the size of eggs, then marbles, and, lastly, gravel and sand at the Eype rocks some two miles beyond Bridport. It would probably take any one of our party many weary marches over this treacherous heavy ground before he could tell, within a long, long way, the position in which he stood upon the bank by reference to the size of individual pebbles; yet in days of high duties instead of French treaties, when profits on contraband goods were large and smugglers many and cunning, the experienced crew found plainly marked milestones in every pebble even in the darkest nights, and could tell within a very little at what distance from the island a run had been effected.
The independent position of the beach is by far its most striking feature, continuing, long after its novelty has ceased to astonish, to suggest the inquiry, How came this pebble isthmus cutting the blue bay in half, and leaving Portland perhaps the most problematic island in the world? For we suppose that, judged by the standard of Goldsmith or Johnson, the term is misapplied. If an island, to be truly worthy of its name, must necessarily be completely surrounded by water, then is Portland a peninsula; if, however, it is sufficient for the attainment of insular dignity that a patch of cliff, some seven miles long by three miles wide, should be detached from the mainland by an intervening space of five miles of blue water bridged only by a thin streak of beach, then do we set both geographer and lexicographer at nought, and dub their technical peninsula a practical island.
The interest of this little philological difficulty does not last us long in the immediate presence of the “previous question,” How did these pebbles get where we see them? Did they rise one fine day bodily from the bed of the sea, and form the bar by some sudden cataclysmic effort? Then, too, setting aside this problem for a moment, we face another equally puzzling question. Where did they come from? We have been many a time over every inch of the white cliffs of Portland; we have seen them from above, from below, and from the water; we have examined the published geological sections of the island, yet nowhere within its boundaries have we been able to discover a single stratum from which the stones about us could have been derived. They are for the most part chalk flints, with an admixture of darker-coloured pebbles from some older formation than the island sufficient to give the reddish tinge to the bank. Let us fare forth for a long imaginary ramble with two or three representatives of the general contents of the beach in our pockets, and try to track them to their original source. Recrossing the ferry-bridge we find the mainland to be a continuation of the oolitic strata of Portland, and following the coast line we pass Langton, Abbotsbury, Burton, and Bridport, with the same
- ↑ See Vol. ii. p. 67.
