“No! I never saw anything like them before. Nor you, either! There’s nothing to equal the wild life on the Ipswich Bar, at low tide, nearer than the bird reservation on Three Arch Rocks, off the Oregon Coast; that’s what I heard a great naturalist say!... And, oh! see--see! there are some of my cousins, the great herons, just gobbling up everything in sight,” trilled Olive Deering--Blue Heron--in a shrill treble of excitement which, winging right out of her, fluttered on to the bar, to greet those feathered fisher-folk, her cousins.
“Of course, the Arch Rocks, being a reservation, go a long way beyond anything we could see here, for the teeming multitudes of their bird-life--the grandeur of their nested arches,” she added softly, her dark eyes alight, her breast rising and falling, light as a cork, upon a pure, primitive flame of being, typified by the red tongue of flame of the Torch Bearer’s emblem, with crossed logs and pearly smoke, embroidered upon the bosom of her glossy bathing-suit.
It was one of those outdoor moments when, as she had told Lieutenant Davenport, there seemed to be but an illumined fag-end of her real self left in the five feet nine of red-crowned girlish form perched airily, now, upon the side of the red-skinned settler.
The rest, the main part, had become one with the joyful feather-folk, the spotted mammals sunning themselves, with the blue of the sky above, the dazzling flower of foam on the bonnet of the green old whistling tide, off on a holiday from the shore--and with a Father Presence in all, scarce veiled, so radiantly apprehended at the moment that faith was almost sight.
She came to herself with a backward glance at a twilight balcony, at a young soldier who had, in feeling, come nearer to God since he volunteered--came to her transfigured self in time to hear that officer’s little flame of a sister gaily protesting: “Bah! Three Arch Rocks! Who craves for Oregon? This is good enough for us. Now--now--now comes the shock, as the soldiers say; now, for finding out how near those seals will let us get to them, before they take to the water! Hitherto they’ve had the bar all to themselves, except for the birds. But:
“‘Ils ne l’aurout plus,
Jamais! Jamais!’
“We’re out for possession, too, this summer!... Oh, mercy! Here they come, stampeding--flopping. Oh, sit tight, girls; if they strike the boat, they may----”
“They can’t capsize us!” burst explosively from sister lips. “The old settler----”
She was a settler, a sturdy one, that camp skiff. She rocked and wallowed, but settled down, as in a nest, in the green hubbub of tide and foam stirred up by the wildly startled plunging-off of thirty sportive young seals, which, striking the water with the heavy splashes of men bathers, swam deliriously around in all directions, whipping the eddies with their active flippers, amid a low tornado of broken exclamations from the girls.