The first warm weather of the year, the exquisite but fugitive beauties of the spring, lent emphasis to his mood, and because his home was not a soil congenial to the growth of any but the more ordinary sentiments, he began at this time to seek in natural solitudes a more fitting environment for his musings.

More than once, in the days that immediately followed, he sought by daylight the spot where, in the darkness, he had seen the child thrown into the sea.

It soon occurred to him to make an epitaph for her, and carve it in the cliff over which she was thrown.

In the noon-day hours in which his father rested, he worked at this task, and grew to feel at home in the place and its surroundings.
The earth in this place, as in others, showed red, the colour of red jasper, wherever its face was not covered by green grass or blue water.
Just here, where the mother had sought out a precipice under which the tide lay deep, there was a natural water-wall of red sandstone, rubbed and corrugated by the waves.

This wall of rock extended but a little way, and ended in a sharp jutting point.
The little island that stood out toward the open sea had sands of red gold; level it was and covered with green bushes, its sandy beach surrounding it like a ring.
On the other side of the jutting point a bluff of red clay and crumbling rock continued round a wide bay.