“You’d look like the Winged Victory,” called Kate. “But I know what you mean. Like this?” She opened her white sweater coat, and held it wide to the wind, like wings. “It makes you feel like a gull.”
“Oh, my feet are wet, girls.” Ted sat down on a rock, and deliberately took off her low tan shoes. “What’s the difference? I’m going barefooted and have some fun.”
Five minutes later Aunty Welcome looked out of the kitchen door and saw a sight that made her fairly gasp. Carrying their shoes and stockings, a line of barefooted girls clambered up the mass of rocks at the Knob.
“Well, for de land’s sakes,” cried Aunty. “Who’d believe dose wasn’t a pack ob gypsies?”
But the girls waved back to her, and she had to laugh over the sight after all.
“Those rocks up there are the highest part of the island,” said Polly. “Let’s go clear up to the top.”
The girls clambered after her, over the slippery rocks, rocks that were gray with barnacles down along their sides. The water had filled up all the little hollows, and Polly bent down over one to examine it.
“Just look, girls,” she said. “These are limpets, the kind that open their shells to the tide, as if they were thirsty. You know them, Ruth.”
“Patella pellucida, semi-transparent, sticks to fronds of seaweed,” responded “Grandma,” in her deliberate way.
She lifted a long, wet strand of seaweed, and waved it in the air. Something fell off.