"But I can swim, M. le Seigneur, and I will be very, very careful."
"Well, well! You can have the boat, child. But if any ill comes of it, remember, I shall feel myself to blame. So be careful for my sake also."
And so the yellow cockleshell became Carette's golden bridge, and thereafter her comings and goings knew no bounds but her own wilful will and the states of the tides and the weather.
Krok's ideas in the matter of seigneurial rights of flotsam and jetsam were by no means as strict as his master's, especially where Carette was concerned. In his mute, dog-like way he worshipped Carette. In case of need, he would, I believe, have given his left hand in her service; and the right, I think he would have kept for himself and me. He procured from somewhere a great beam of ship's timber, and with infinite labour fixed it securely in a crevice of the rocks, high up by the Galé de Jacob, with one end projecting over the shelving rocks below. Then, with rope and pulley from the same ample storehouse, he showed Carette how she could, with her own unaided strength, hitch on her cockleshell and haul it up the cliff side out of reach of the hungriest wave. He made her a pair of tiny sculls too, and thenceforth she was free of the seas, and she flitted to and fro, and up and down that rugged western coast, till it was all an open book to her. But so venturesome was she, and so utterly heedless of danger, that we all went in fear for her, and she laughed all our fears to scorn.
CHAPTER VII
HOW I SHOWED ONE THE WAY TO THE BOUTIQUES
Another scene stands out very sharply in my recollection of the boy and girl of those early days, from the fact that it gave our Island folk a saying which lasted a generation, and whenever I heard the saying it brought the whole matter back to me.
"Show him the way to the Boutiques," became, in those days, equivalent to "mislead him—trick him—deceive him"—and this was how it came about.