And, indeed, it is not every one who can discover a garden of live flowers outside a fairy-book. But this was nicer than any fairy-book, as their Aunt Claire said when Kenneth and Rose showed it to her the very next day after she came to the island. And she ought to know, for she writes fairy-books and tells stories better than any one else, so the children think.
CHAPTER X
BURIED TREASURE
ONE day Kenneth and his father went out fishing with Captain Prout. Rose and Aunt Claire did not care to go, because they did not enjoy fishing. But instead they decided to spend the morning on the sandy beach, not far from the cottage, which was a grand play-room and bathing-place for the children. It was the only sandy beach on that rocky island.
Rose ran ahead of her Aunt Claire, and as soon as she reached the beach she sat down to pull off her shoes and stockings. For in this lovely play-room she never wore shoes, nor even sandals, but ran around with bare toes on the smooth, soft floor, making funny little tracks just as the sandpipers do. But of course Rose’s footprints were larger than their three-toed ones.
When they reached the beach they saw that the tide was very low, and that the sand stretched out like a great sheet of paper, smooth and white, without a mark upon it, from the seaweed line to the water. For it was early in the morning, and they were the very first persons on the spot. Yesterday they had made houses of sand and had dug deep wells all up and down the beach. But in the night the sea had stolen up and swept everything smooth again, even wiping out the tracks of feet which had crossed and criss-crossed it everywhere,—Aunt Claire’s tennis shoes, Kenneth’s and Rose’s little bare footprints, the deep tread of the clam-digger’s rubber boots, and the sandpipers’ light steps. The beach looked like a field covered with newly fallen snow on which nothing has yet made a mark.
Then Aunt Claire, who was always having splendid ideas, thought of a lovely game to play upon this smooth whiteness.
THE SAND STRETCHED OUT LIKE A GREAT SHEET OF PAPER
“Oh, Rose,” she cried, “let us play a new kind of hide-and-seek. I will shut my eyes, and you take this pretty whirly-shell which we found yesterday and hide it somewhere in the sand. Then I will try to find it by following the track of your bare feet.”
“Oh, goodie!” said Rose, clapping her hands. “That is a nice game. Play I am a pirate going to hide my treasure in the ground, and you are another pirate hunting for it. Blind your eyes, Auntie. Blind them tight, and don’t you peek!”