There were few things that gave Kep Drummond more real pleasure than the graphic little descriptions of sea-scapes which occurred every here and there in the boys' stories he read. He knew the true from the false, and avoided tales by authors who had probably never been further from shore than one could pitch a biscuit.
Oh, if ever the glamour of old ocean had got right round a lad's heart and altered all his life and thoughts, that lad was Kep Drummond. The passages he chiefly delighted in were those that seemed to bring the scene right up before the boy's mind's eye, like pictures from a magic lantern. Though but little over fourteen years of age, he had a wonderful imagination and was full to the brim with the poetry of true feeling. En rapport, in fact, with all that is charming in nature, part and parcel of all the life and love he could see around him on such a sunny summer's day as that on which I now present him for the first time to my readers' notice.
Seated he is on the high and grassy top of a rocky cliff that beetles over what he calls his own sea, because the land all around here belongs to his father. Those tremendous rocks are the guardians of his father's Cornish estate. Behind him stretch wild moorlands and rising hills, while down below--peeping over the greenery of elm woods--red rise the turrets of what the boy knows as home.
But he leans his back against a hillock of tasseled turf, and opens a book; and as he reads his thoughts, his dreams, fly straight away through space, six thousand miles and over to the sylvan-bound silver sands of the Indian Ocean. And this is what he is reading: "How windless and warm it is! One's shoes take up the pitch and soil the ivory-white quarter-deck. We are only a gun-boat, but there isn't a yard-arm one inch out of the square, a rope's end uncoiled, nor a capstan bar awry; the wood work scintillates, the brass work shines like burnished gold, and our guns have the shimmer of papier maché. But our men to-day all look fagged and lazy. They are sun-weary. Yet every Jack amongst them is as neatly dressed as if he were about to take part in a nautical opera.
"The water round the ship, which is lying at anchor, is clearer to-day than gum copal. Five fathoms beneath we can see the bottom well; see the coral rocks, see patches of coral sand and the ever waving mysterious-looking seaweed, the home of crustaceans black or blue and grey, and of curious fishes that glide and dart, clad in every colour of the rainbow.
"Nearer the surface are scores and scores of splendid medusæ or jelly-fishes; under their waving limbs glint and radiate rubies, emeralds and sapphires. On this brightest day of tropical sunshine they float lazily along with the tide, but they are perilously near to the shore, and hundreds will be stranded on the beach. Many a little azure nautilus or 'Portuguese man o' war' sails hither and thither on the gently-heaving waves.
"Seawards, if we look, the ocean's breast is flecked and patched with tender graze greens and with opal tints, but towards the horizon it is as blue as the sky itself. Landwards, in long white lines, the breakers roll in on the snow-white sands that are at present all but deserted by both negro and Somali, who will sleep in the shadows till the sun sinks lower and lower and kisses the sea good-night. Yonder are the silvery house-blocks of Zanzibar, but the flags on the various consulates droop listlessly roofwards, and our own white ensign is almost trailing in the waters astern."
Kep closes the book, closes his eyes, too, but he is not going to sleep, but only just to day-dream, and his long brown fingers keeps the place for him.
There is the thunder of waves beneath the cliffs leaping lion-like on the black and weed-trailed rocks; there is the scream of the British sea-mew too, and the long lorn wail of many another sea-bird that floats all day 'twixt sky and sea. They are all the boy's friends and favourites, and when at morn or noon he dashes into the water and breasts the billows far off the shore, they fly friendly around his head, or float so white and near he might almost touch their paddling feet.
The glamour of the ocean!