THE HALLIG.
––––
CHAPTER I.
"The eye's first upward glancing at the day,
The first faint footprints on life's dusty way,
The mother's name lisped feebly at her knees,
Can time steal from us memories like these?"
Along the western coast of the Duchy of Schleswig,
embosomed in the waves of the North Sea, lie several
islands which are the remains of a portion of the neigh-
boring shore that has fallen a prey to the ocean, and
serve as a continual warning to the inhabitants of the
mainland to resist the encroachments of the waves
by every means at their command.
The larger islands are protected, partly by dykes
(artificial sea-walls), and partly by downs (natural hill-
ocks of sand), against the waves, which daily ad-
vancing and retreating with the tide, seem to be in-
cessantly making renewed efforts to sweep into the
greedy abyss of the ocean the last fragments of their
mighty spoil. At ebb-tide the sea retires so far as to
expose a soft slimy flat, miles in width, whose rippled
surfce repeats the forms of the waves that were roll-
