“It’ll be dark in half an hour.”
“Not quite, and we shall be there by that time; we needn’t go far out, and the tide’s with us.” So the two brave brothers rowed steadily on, with only one more remark from Charlie, ushered in by the word—
“Walter?”
“Anything more to frighten me with, Charlie?” he answered cheerily; “you shan’t succeed.”
“Well, Walter,” he answered, with a little touch of shame, “I was only going to say that, if you look, you’ll see that your oar’s been broken, and is only spliced together.”
“I’ve seen it all along, Charlie, and will use the oar gingerly; and now, Charlie, I see you’re a little frightened, my boy. I’m going to brace you up. Rest on your oar a minute.”
He did so. “Now turn round and look.”
He pointed with his finger to a dark figure, now distinctly seen, cowering low at the white cliff’s foot.
“O Walter, I’m ready; I won’t say a word more;” and he leant to his oar, and plied it like a man.
It is a pretty, a delightful thing, in idle summer-time to lie at full length upon the beach on some ambrosial summer evening, when a glow floats over the water, whose calm surface is tenderly rippled with gold and blue. And while the children play beside you, dabbling and paddling in the wavelets, and digging up the ridges of yellow sand, which take the print of their pattering footsteps, nothing is more pleasant than to let the transparent stream of the quiet tide plash musically with its light and motion to your very feet; nothing more pleasant than to listen to its silken murmurs, and to watch it flow upwards with its beneficent coolness, and take possession of the shore. But it is a very different thing when there rises behind you a wall of frowning cliff, precipitous, inaccessible, affording no hope of refuge; and when, for the golden calm of summer eventide, you have the cheerless drawing-in of a loud and stormy February night; and when you have the furious hissing violence of rock-and-wind-struck breakers for the violet-coloured margin of rippling waves—knowing that the wind is wailing forth your requiem, and that, with the fall of every breaker, unseen hands are ringing your knell of death.