"Sure, it's like asking me could he get used to the sunshine," answered Danny, gallantly.—"If you leave it to Sandy to find the shore, he'll take you the quickest way."
CHAPTER IX
ALL SANDY'S FAULT
Everything was so different from the Connecticut verdure and underbrush. Instead of the thick, lush growth which came from richly watered black loam, here one found sand cherries and little dwarf willows and beeches springing up from the sand. Tall sword grass waved almost like Cousin Roxy's striped ribbon grass in the home garden, and wild sunflowers showed like golden glow here and there.
The beach was level and rockless, different entirely from the Eastern Atlantic shores, but the sand was beautifully white and fine, and there were great weather-beaten, wave-washed boulders lying half buried in the sand, also trunks of trees, their roots uprearing grotesquely like strange heads of animals. Kit thought whimsically how the Dean might have added them with profit to his prehistoric collection. There was no glimpse or hint of the town to be seen down here. Not even a boat house, only one long pier. About a mile and a half from shore was a lightship, and farther out a white steamer showed in perfect outline against the blueness of the morning sky.
Kit followed Sandy's lead, hardly realizing the distance she was covering, until he suddenly disappeared behind a nosing headland. When she rounded it, she saw a cottage built close under the shelter of the bluff. The sand drifted like snow half-way up to its windows. It had been painted red once, but now its old clapboards were the color of sorrel, and weather-beaten and wave-washed like the boulders. There were fish nets drying on tall staples driven in behind a couple of overturned rowboats, and at that first glimpse it seemed to her as if there were children everywhere. Four stalwart boys from fourteen to eighteen worked over the nets, mending them; around the back door there were four or five more, and sitting in the sunlight in a low rocking-chair was an old woman as picturesque as some ancient sibyl.
Sandy seemed to greet them as old acquaintances, so Kit called good-morning in good old Yankee fashion. The boys eyed her, somewhat askance, and all of the children scurried like a flock of startled chickens as she came up the boardwalk to the kitchen door, but the old grandmother kept serenely on paring potatoes, calm-eyed and unembarrassed.
"How do you do?" said Kit, smilingly. "I'm Dean Peabody's grandniece. I just came west yesterday, and Sandy brought me here this morning. I didn't know where he was going, but he seemed to know the way."
The old woman's brown eyes followed the movement of the dog.