CHAPTER IV.
THE RUNNING SANDS.
He awoke to find the sun shining in at his window.

At first he wondered what had happened.

The window seemed to be in the ceiling, and the ceiling sloped down to the walls, and all the furniture had gone astray into wrong positions.

Then he remembered, jumped out of bed, and drew the blind.
He saw a blue line of sea, so clearly drawn that the horizon might have been a string stretched from the corner eaves to the snow-white light-house standing on the farthest spit of land; blue sea and yellow sand curving round it, with a white edge of breakers; inshore, the sand rising to a cliff ridged with grassy hummocks; farther inshore, the hummocks united and rolling away up to inland downs, but broken here and there on their way with scars of sand; over all, white gulls wheeling.

He could hear the nearest ones mewing as they sailed over the house.
Taffy had seen the sea once before, at Dawlish, on the journey to Tewkesbury; and again on the way home.