Beatrice

Dusk settles over the coast in late autumn. The day's grey cloud has thinned and drifted apart, leaving only deepening blue overhead. The water lies so still it seems to be sleeping, yet it keeps rising with the tide, too gradually for the eye to follow. Standing at the far end of the Dog Rocks, Beatrice watches the brown seaweed clinging to the stones lift as the sea takes its weight, until the fronds spread out across the green water like a woman's loose hair.

This is the opening of Beatrice, a novel by H. Rider Haggard, the English writer best known for adventure stories such as King Solomon's Mines. The passage is a quiet, atmospheric scene, and it introduces the heroine through her attention to the natural world.