We did not forget to make a day’s voyage to the Bass Rock, and well might we wonder at the grandeur of this wild rock, with its feathered thousands of birds, that at times rose about like a vast and fleecy cloud.
It was, however, no part of our ideas of happiness to in any way hamper each other’s movements. No, that would not have been true gipsy fashion.
Sometimes, one of us would be quietly fishing from the rocks, while two more might be out at sea in a boat, a little dark speck on the blue. As for me, it was often my delight to—
“Lie upon the headland height and listen
To the incessant sobbing of the sea
In caverns under me.
And watch the waves that tossed and fled and glistened,
Until the rolling meadows of amethyst
Melted away in mist.”
Often, when she found me all alone, Ida would pounce on me for a story. To this child a tale told all to herself had a peculiar charm. Here is one of our little sketches.
Our “Hoggie.”
One dark, starless night in October, 1883, I had been making a call upon a neighbour of mine in the outskirts of our village. I had a tricycle lamp with me, not so much to show me the way as to show me my dogs, a valuable Newfoundland and a collie. Both are as black as Erebus, and unless I have a light on a dark night, it is impossible to know whether I have them near me or not.
Just by the gate, but on the footpath, as I came out, I found my canine friends both standing over and intently watching something that lay between them.
“It is a kind of a thorny rat,” Eily the collie seemed to say, looking up in my face ever so wisely; “I have kept it in the corner till you should see it; but I wouldn’t put my nose to it again for a whole bushel of bones.”