June 27 + 

A brilliant summer day. Up early, breakfasted, and, clad in sweater and trousers, walked up the sands to the boathouse with bare feet. + 

Everything was wonderful! I strode along over the level sands infatuated with the sheer ability to put one leg in front of the other and walk. I loved to feel the muscles of my thighs working, and to swing my arms in rhythm with the stride. The stiff breeze had blown the sky clear, and was rushing through my long hair, and bellowing into each ear. I strode as Alexander must have done! + 

Then I stretched my whole length out along a flat plank on the sands, which was as dry as a bone and warm. There was not a soul on the sands. Everything was bare, clean, windswept. My plank had been washed clean and white. The sands⁠—3 miles of it⁠—were hard and purified, level. My eye raced along in every direction⁠—there was nothing⁠—not a bird or a man⁠—to stop it. In that immense windswept space nothing was present save me and the wind and the sea⁠—a flattering moment for the egotist. + 

At the foot of the cliffs on the return journey met an old man gathering sticks. As he ambled along dropping sticks into a long sack he called out casually, “Do you believe in Jesus Christ?” in the tone of voice in which one would say, “I think we shall have some rain before night.” “Aye, aye,” came the answer without hesitation from a boy lying on his back in the sands a few yards distant, “and that He died to save me.” + 

Life is full of surprises like this. The only other sounds I have heard today were the Herring Gull’s cackle. Your own gardener will one day look over his rake and give you the correct chemical formula for carbonic acid gas. I met a postman once reading Shelley as he walked his rounds. + 