The visitor’s heart sank at the forbidding aspect of the place. He was faint for want of food, weary and low-spirited from the frights he had had, and, in place of finding his destination some handsome mansion where there would be a warm welcome, it seemed to him that he had come to a savage dungeon-like place, on the very extreme of the earth, where all looked desolate and forlorn among the ruins, and the sea was beating at the foot of the rocks on which they stood.
In an ordinary way Kenneth would have run the skiff past the castle and round behind into the little land-locked bay, where his visitor could have stepped ashore in still water. But, as he afterwards told Scood, there would have been no fun in that. So he steered in among the rocks where the castle front faced the sea, and, after the sail had been lowered, he manipulated the boat till they were rising and falling in the uneasy tide, close alongside of a bundled-together heap of huge granite rocks, where he leapt ashore.
“Now then!” he cried; “give me your hand.” It was a simple thing to do, that leaping on to the rock. All that was necessary was to jump out as the wave receded and left a great flat stone bare; but Max Blande look the wrong time, and stepped, as the wave returned, knee-deep among the slippery golden fucus, and, but for Kenneth’s hand, he would have slipped and gone headlong into the deep water at the side.
There was a drag, a scramble, and, with his arm feeling as if it had been jerked out of the socket, Max stood dripping on the dry rocks beneath the castle, and Kenneth shouted to Scood,—
“Get your father to help you bring in those things, and make her fast, Scood.”
“Ou ay,” was the reply; and Kenneth led the way toward the yawning old gateway.
“Come along,” he said. “It’s only salt water, and will not give you cold. This is where the fellows used to come to attack the castle, and get knocked on the head. Nice old place, isn’t it?”
“Yes, very,” said Max breathlessly, as he clambered the difficult ascent his companion had chosen.
“See that owl fly out? Look! there goes a heron across there—there over the sea. Oh, you haven’t got your seaside eyes yet.”
“No; I couldn’t see it. But do you live here?”