Excerpt from The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 44: A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics
At the south end of Block Island is a line of grand cliffs from one to two hundred feet high. Some of them are grass-grown to the very beach; but most of them have a rough surface of clay and sand worn into enormous furrows by the rain. They are of irregular shape, some spreading out into wide plateaus on the top, others being merely a sharp point of land running out between two broad ravines.
At sunset, in summer, the mists from the ocean often gather slowly in these ravines, and curl upward like colossal smoke-wreaths from subterranean homes. Gradually they spread over the island, until all road-ways, gates, and fences are obliterated, and men grope their way about by the sense of feeling. A person unacquainted with the labyrinthine paths of the island is as helpless in one of these thick mists as in a blinding snow-storm.
It was on such a night as this thai Massy Sprague's daughter, Toinette, was cautiously groping her way home from the cliffs. Toinette had been lying on the cliffs all the afternoon. There is a great fascination in lying flat, face down, on these cliffs, and looking over the edge, where the earth seems to be only an inch thick under your shoulders. Somebody said once that these cliffs looked as if they had been broken off from some other side, as a loaf of cake is broken into jagged and unequal parts, with the crust left projecting here and there. Perhaps a giant did it some day, and threw his half of the loaf into the sea. But no such speculations as these had occupied the mind of Toinette this June afternoon, as she had lain with her elbows propped firmly in the knotted grass, and her chin resting on the palms of her hands, looking down on the beach below. White-sailed ships had come and gone in the blue offing, sailing south and sailing north, but Toinette had taken no note of them. Her eyes were riveted on the brown sand one hundred feet below her. Across this beach Ramby Karns drove his father's cows home every night, and Toinette and Ramby had a system of signals carefully arranged and thoroughly understood, by which they communicated with each other at this point upon the shore. It would seem as if two people living on an island only eight miles long and three wide need never be driven to establishing signal stations in mid-air, to reach each other.
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