THE CHARM OF SAND.
THE love of sand is universal, felt by all, and at all ages. The child finds in it a ready and a plentiful material for giving something of definiteness to the world of his childish imagination ; and when experience shall have proved the real world to be less pleasant, and not expressible in sand, he, nevertheless, as a grown man, tacitly admits the attraction of the old-time medium, and spends his holidays upon it. No watering-place need trouble as to its prosperity if it has a broad forefront of sand.
Probably so general and ingrained a love is only to be accounted for as the result of a sympathetic and unconscious " harking back " to the feel of the life on the dry sandy soils of the East, upon which man first wandered and in which he first delved. He can sit or lie with greater comfort and ease —as he originally sat, without a chair, or lay, without a couch—upon sand than upon any other kind of earth ; and upon sand he reverts readily, and without fear of convention, to primeval barefootedness. Possibly even the charm of the " sanded floor "—in the concrete to our forefathers ; to us in the abstract of happy description of the comfort and cosiness of cheery inn parlours and kitchens, warm with the ruddy heat of glowing logs, on snowy nights—may also be due to vaguely assertive instinct. In proof, it may be readily concluded that far-distant man would not have been long in finding out the advantages of a dry cave as a dwelling- place. It would be found most readily in soft, friable rocks. The natural and further easy expansion of the cave to meet growing demands for house-room,,by scraping down of roof and sides, would result in a sanded floor. Litter of rude cave living and housekeeping could be more easily swept out, with the leafy bough or bunch of sedges acting as the original broom, when mixed with sand than without its aid. The savage family which swept its cave out oftenest and most thoroughly would certainly be the healthiest and strongest. Other families and tribes would not have been long in noting the effective value of sand as contributing to the
superior power of competitors and opponents, and in taking to using it.
Sand may thus very conceivably even merit ethical.honours in having originated human cleanliness. And if an adverse critic should come along and speak of the instability of a theory, as of " a house built upon the sand," our reply must be that it depends entirely upon the treatment of the sand ; for, mixed with a proportion of fitting cement, it forms, as concrete, as stable a foundation as any, and more so than many a rock.
From its loose nature, sand cannot form part of those larger masses the configuration of which in mountain, crag, or deep-cut ravine arouses the higher emotions of majesty and awe. But compensation is to be found in its inducements to a restful, placid frame of mind, and the readiness with which it lends itself to those low, gentle lines of contour that by their unobtrusiveness allow either the imagination itself to work untrammelled, or give encouragement to that type of thought which from its breadth needs something of aid from the imagination. Walking on sand aids such thinking. It must be slow to be comfortable. The sinking of the foot forbids haste. The quality lurks in even the individual handful. Loosely grasped, and allowed to trickle out slowly between the slackened fingers, it leads the mind gently into the warm and spacious land of afternoon.
In our small island home, in which the sea is so closely and generally associated with sand, the brine in British blood strengthens by alliance our love for sand. The sand of sands taus is that of the broad and shallow estuary which has been washed twice a day for ages by the salt sea water, and dried as often by the salt sea breeze,—miles of yellow sand, soft, dry, and powdery in highest fringe of dunes; firm and cool to the bare foot in middle spaces ; pooled and channelled in outer reaches by the heavier sway of tides, and graced by white-winged gulls. We have them around our coasts, in the Moray Firth, the Wash, the Bristol Channel, and other inlets. The best way of getting into complete touch with such sands is to camp out for a week or two on their margin, preferably under the shadow of a low cliff, and within easy reach of fresh water and a village. There should be one old friend as companion, and he gifted with the blessing of infrequent speech. Books must be regarded as a necessity. The modi- fications which they have produced in the character of enjoyment since the first distant life on the sand, which we seek to feel the spirit of, is so marked as to make them indis- pensable to complete pleasure. Newspapers, both from being newer and blunter evolutionary tools, are unnecessary. The trimming which they have produced so far has been less marked, and can be ignored without danger. But the books should be few, and of the right kind : sufficiently strong to sustain interest, and not heavy enough to tempt into deeper grooves of thought. Books of fiction without a "problem " to solve or an " ism" to illustrate, of history treated broadly, and of travel well permeated with the personal element are, perhaps, as satisfactOry as any. Robert Louis Steven- son reads well lying at ease on warm sand after tea on a summer's evening, the book propped against an easily made and readjusted pillow of sand. So do Kinglake—in " Eothen " at least—Scott, Dumas, and Froude. Philo- sophical books we need not. Their more fitting place is on the bookshelf, within easy reach of the low, deep-seated chair at the winter fireside. Sand has a philosophy of its own, fully satisfying, although inexpressible from its breadth and airiness. It is Turner compared with the Preraphaelite Brotherhood. No one knows what attracts him in a Turner painting, and no one knows what attracts him to sand. It is nothing that can be confined within the bounds of a canon. Facts and figures form no part of the attraction. The hopeless innumerability of the grains of sand—dust of past worlds broken down by the weight of ages— lessens the orthodox worth of figures. Two and two certainly make four, on the sands as on the rocks, but it seems of less moment that they should. Indeed, indifference rises sometimes to so esoteric a height as to permit of the pleasure of a vague suggestion that in sonic other world two and two may not make four, or even that parallel lines may meet, without making very much difference, after all, to anybody.
The life of the tent—the tent is instinctively associated with sand—means sand at its best : at grey dawn, in midday heat and soft evening calm. Why, generally, should not the important education to appreciate fresh air and plain food not be carried out in tents and simple bungalows erected upon the common boundaries of sandy spaces and heathery moorland around our coasts ? Thoughtful and experienced physicians believe and say that it is better to offer the bulwark of such an education, with full combative life-energy in hand, to the great national enemy of Consumption, than delay the fight until he shall have gained the advantage of the first blow and wound. The essentials are so very simple and cheap,— fresh air, suitable food, and a few sanitary precautions. The safety of an open window can never be thoroughly learnt from books in the town ; it can be learnt without them, under canvas or in a bungalow, on the sands or moor.
Wanted, a millionaire to eradicate consumption in Great Britain in twenty years, by camping school-children, willing campers, on sand for a month before starting upon the work of life. Alas! be must have been bred upon the sand, to be open to the call ; and millionaires are not bred upon the spacious, silent sands, but in close offices and noisy workshops. whence they rise to power, with an honest desire to benefit their kind, through the overestimated value, and wrongly estimated functions, of books and pictures.
But be the camper-out whom he may, one glory of the sandy, if facing west, will be pre-eminently his : the colours of the Almighty in the Western heavens when the sun shall have been quenched in the sea. The glories of the sunsets of our homely English sands of the West are not to be equalled in any part of the world. Those reared upon their edges feel an attraction for sand as strong as the Arab's. If such a one shall have wandered into distant lands, it is not the vivid glory of the tropical scene that he sees through tired, half-closed eyes, but the afterglow of sunset on his native sands, and the faint gleam from the light- house on the distant rocky " sker." The cloying scent of tropical plants is not in his nostril, but the pungent twang of seaweed on wet sand; and in his ears is not the rustle of palms, but the murmur of the shallow home- tide. Sand is woven into his soul-fibre. That fibre is, however, a loose-textured one, as is befitting to retain sand. It must be admitted that it requires hard earth to breed hard men, possessing those sterner and firmer qualities which bring success in the struggles for precedence and leadership along the stony ways of life. Still, the readiness to be led must for the well-being of the world at large be a necessary quality in incomparably the greater number, and in generating this readiness the highest formative function of sand is seen. Life, too, has breadths as well as heights, and the fierce but short-lived joy of the climber at rising above lower peaks, laboriously surmounted, may, looking upon life as a whole, be perhaps well counter- balanced by the lower-keyed, but steadier and more uniform, pleasures of him who elects for the broader and easier spaces of the lower world. And when, indifferently, the treader of the bard and the sandy ways of life thinks of the world he hopes next to tread in, as " Heaven " to both, it would not be complete without its "golden sands." In this quality it is a heaven by contrast to him of the rocky heights, but simply as a continuation of the earth he loved best to him whose earth was sand. Can there be higher proof of the worth of sand ?
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