Presently the water appeared before them, but as yet no quarry, only green fields ending abruptly against the blue of the water. But after proceeding a very little farther, they found themselves overlooking a very different scene. They were at the top of a gradual incline to the water's brink, covered over with stone ledges broken into quarries, among which a large number of men were working busily. Near the water, the rock was worn by the waves into very fantastic shapes; and, as there was a steep ascent from the shore, it formed natural steps and terraces in many places.
"Let's go down there by the water," said Felix: "it's always great fun walking about among such holes and windings in the rocks, where the waves keep rolling up to catch you. It's as good as a game of tag."
"Yes: I would like to go down there presently. I never saw rocks so much worn by water as they are. It has taken Nature a good many hundred years to do all that chiselling, but she's made handsomer work of it than these men have. There's going to be a blast now. See those men running this way. Let's go and find what luck they've had, when it's over."
The boys got off of their bicycles, and, a moment after, there was a loud report. The men then went back to the place where the explosion had taken place, and the boys followed them. They found the stone very evenly split.
"This granite don't give you much trouble about splitting evenly," said Johnny to the men.
"If it did, we shouldn't be at work here, year after year."
"I didn't know there was any difference in granite," said Felix.
"There's just as much difference in granite as there is in boys," replied the other man, winking at his companion: "you know there's good boys and bad boys, dull boys and smart boys, and boys all the way between."
"I know of a granite quarry," remarked Johnny, "where they don't get out any stone better than is used for making the cellars and underpinnings of common houses, and for walls and rough buildings."
"There's plenty of that kind of stone for miles around," replied one of the men: "the stone just here at the Point is all there is that's worth much of any thing, all along this part of the State."