Tiny was half offended. "You needn't laugh," she said; "I shall do it, Dick."
"Will yer?" he said, in a teasing tone. "If there wasn't no whisky, and there was bookshops at Fellness, you might. Why, what do you think the village is like?" he asked.
"Like? Oh, I dunno! Everything comes from Fellness," added the little girl, vaguely.
To the dwellers at the Point, the little fishing-village was the centre of the universe; and Tiny, with faint recollections of a large town, with broad streets, and rows of shops all brilliantly lighted at night, had formed magnificently vague notions of Fellness as being something like this; and she had only got to go there, and it would be easy to coax the old fisherman to buy her a book, as she coaxed him to build her a castle in the sand, or take her on his knee and tell her tales of ships that had been wrecked on the bar sands.
"But do you know what Fellness is like?" persisted Dick. "There ain't no shops at all—only one, where they sells flour, and bread, and 'bacca, and tea, and sugar, and soap. They has meat there sometimes; but I never sees no books, and I don't believe they ever has 'em there," concluded the boy.
"Perhaps they keeps 'em in a box where you can't see 'em," suggested Tiny, who was very unwilling to relinquish her hope.
"Pigs might fly, and they will when they sells books at Fellness," remarked Dick.
"Where does Harry Hayes get his from?" suddenly asked the girl; and at the same moment she espied a speck on the horizon, which she decided was a fisherman's boat. "He's coming, Dick, dad's coming," she exclaimed. "Make haste—make haste and fill up the baskets;" and she tore away at the seaweed, piling it into the baskets as fast as her small hands would permit. "Now we'll carry one down," she said, taking hold of the handle. "Catch hold, Dick;" for she wanted to be at the edge of the sands by the time the boat touched the shore.
But Dick was in no such hurry to meet his father. "There's plenty of time," he said, leisurely untying a knot in a piece of string.
"No there isn't, Dick; don't you know I'm going to Fellness in the boat."