“Oh, I love that,” Ruth exclaimed, pushing back her hair from her face, as she, too, leaned back to listen. “Say it all, Polly?”
“Not now,” Polly shook her head, “wouldn’t it be a good idea, though, for us to have a sea-poetry night while we’re here? Build a great driftwood fire on the beach, and invite everybody we know, and toast marshmallows, and each one recite or sing her favorite piece about the sea.”
“Fine, Polly, fine,” Ruth nodded her head emphatically. “The Vaughan girls might come over, and Nancy and Tom and maybe Mrs. Carey. Let’s.”
They wandered away, then, towards the long line of rocks that appeared at low tide at the head of the Knob. Polly said they looked like the Aleutian Islands in miniature, and she felt like a lady Colossus stepping out over them. By hunting very closely around them, one could find what Ruth called “the enchanted gardens of the sea;” little pools in the rocks, with sea moss that, when turned over, was full of life, crawling, sprawling, atomic life. The finest strands of seaweed were away out there also, great loose bunches, some like fern fronds, others like live moss, and some like chains of big brown beads or beans.
“Have you found any limpets yet, Polly?” called Ruth. “They’re the wisest ’possums you ever saw. They shut their shells up closely when they know the tide has gone, and then when it comes in, they lift up the top like a little tent, and let the water in to take a drink.”
Polly had taken off her shoes and stockings, and she paddled intrepidly about in the water, and poked after new things. There had been a heavy sea the night before, and the beach was strewn with strands of seaweed, and driftwood, and a fringe of shells at the high tide mark.
Among the odd things they found were oysters fastened in all sorts of strange shapes to bits of rock and wave-worn stones. Polly found a smooth white one, nearly a perfect oval, with two shells opening upward from it, like wings, and she called it Mercury’s slipper. Another flat, green rock had ten tiny baby oysters clinging to it, the shells overlapping one another like barnacles.
So it went every day. When they had a good-sized collection, they would go up on the porch, to sort out, and share, and trade. The prettiest ones they saved for paper weights, but Isabel and Kate refused to declaim over the oystered rocks. With pails they hunted up and down the shore for the pink and green and opal tinted shells that Marbury had nicknamed Neptune’s finger nails. These shells were very shy of the land. You had to walk along the very edge of the water, and watch each incoming wave, then catch the wisps of shells before they slipped back into deep water. Some were pale green, some a cloudy pearl like opals, and others were deep salmon pink. Some were iridescent, and gleamed in the sunlight beautifully. Isabel had set her heart on stringing a portìere to carry back to her mother, and Kate was making one for Miss Calvert as a memento of their summer vacation.
Sue’s hobby was the live castaways of the sea. While the other girls hunted for shells and seaweed, she it was who sought crabs, lobsters, fish, and turtles. Tom brought her some fish poles, and Nancy would join her as she sat on the little, lopsided landing place, fishing tranquilly hour after hour. Good luck attended her, too. Many a savory mess did she bring up to Aunty Welcome for their dinner, and several mornings, long before the other girls were awake, she had sailed away out with Tom and Nancy to what the former called the Little Banks, where the cod ran. One day when the wind had been in the right quarter, they even sailed out around the Point, and caught a glimpse of the open channel out to sea, and the life saving station.
“Nancy,” Sue had said solemnly that day, when they tacked and started homeward, “I should think you would be so proud of your father you wouldn’t know what to do. Don’t you know that a life saver is a hero? Why, down home, if a man saves anybody else’s life, he gets a medal, sometimes from Congress, and it is all written up in the papers, and away off up here, these men go on saving people and saving them, and no one hears anything about it or seems to think it’s wonderful.”