By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories

The quaint, old-fashioned little town faces eastward to the blue
Pacific, whose billows, when the wind blows from any point between north
and east, come tumbling in across the shallow bar in ceaseless lines of
foaming white, to meet, when the tide is on the ebb, the swift current
of a tidal river as broad as the Thames at Westminster Bridge. On the
south side of the bar, from the sleepy town itself to the pilot station
on the Signal Hill, there rises a series of smooth grassy bluffs, whose
seaward bases touch the fringe of many small beaches, or start sheer
upward from the water when the tide is high, and the noisy swish and
swirl of the eager river current has ceased.

As you stand on the Signal Hill, and look along the coast, you see a
long, long monotonous line of beach, trending northward ten miles from
end to end, forming a great curve from the sandspit on the north side of
the treacherous bar to the blue loom of a headland in shape like the
figure of a couchant lion. Back from the shore-line, a narrow littoral
of dense scrub, impervious to the rays of the sun, and unbroken in its
solitude except by the cries of birds, or the heavy footfall of wild
cattle upon the thick carpet of fallen leaves; and then, far to the
west, the dimmed, shadowy outline of the main coastal range.