And the old religious reverence, that fortifying kernel of knighthood, was not neglected by this boy scout patrol.
Bareheaded, and in line with their scoutmasters presently, while their eyes gazed off over the sparkling dunes and crystal tide-stretches, they repeated in unison the Lord’s Prayer, offering morning homage to the Power, dimly discerned, of whom and through whom and to whom are all things. Of his, the Father’s, presence chamber, gladness and beauty stand at the threshold!
“Now, for our early swim! The tide’s just right. Come along, Harold; I’m going to give you your first swimming-lesson; and I expect you’ll be a star pupil!” cried Nixon, the patrol leader, when the brief adoration was over. “What! you don’t want to learn to swim? Nonsense! You are going into that dandy water. Oh! that’s not a scout’s mouth, Harold.”
And the corners of Harold’s mouth, which had drooped with fear of this new experience, curled up in a yielding grin.
Once he was in the invigorating salt water, feeling the boisterous tidal ripples, fresh and not too cold, rise about his body, the timid lad underwent another lightning change, just as at the moment of his tying the bowline knot, the spirit of his fisherman father became uppermost in him, and he learned to swim almost as easily and naturally as a pup-seal.
The improvement in his condition was such that his brother Owls had won his promise to enter school when it should reopen after this jolly camping period was over. “And if any boy picks on you or teases you, Harold, mind you’re to let us know at once, because we’re your brother scouts—and he won’t try it a second time!” So they admonished him.
Thus Harold, under the Owls’ sheltering wing, was gradually losing his inherited and imbibed dread of a crowd, of any gathering of his own kind.
Although this bugbear fear returned upon him a little when, later on that morning, the Fox Patrol, with Godey Peck as its leader, was landed upon the Sugarloaf Dunes from Captain Andy’s motor-launch, and still later in the day the Seals rowed across in two large rowboats from certain farms or fishermen’s houses upon the opposite side of the river, to join the other two patrols. So that the boy scout troop was complete, and Harold found himself one of twenty-four boisterous, though good-natured, boys upon this strange white beach.
A little homesickness beset him for the farm-clearing in the woods and his grandfather’s staid presence, to cure which Scouts Warren and Chase took him off with them in the little rowboat, the Pill, lent by Captain Andy, to explore the tidal river and the little truant creeks that escaped from it to burrow among the salt-marshes.
“We’re going to try and hunt up a creamy pup-seal, Harold, and bring it back to camp,” said Nixon; and in the excitement of this quest the still shy boy forgot his nervous qualms.