“Sit steady, boys, and don’t be philandering!” warned Brother Bart, anxiously. “It looks fair and aisy enough, but you can drown in sun as well as storm. Keep still there, laddie, or ye’ll be over the edge of the boat. Sure it’s an awful thing to think that there’s only a board between ye and the judgment-seat of God.”
And Brother Bart shook his head, and relapsed into meditation befitting the peril of his way; while the “Sary Ann” swept on, past rock and reef and shoal, out into the wide blue open, where the sunlit waves were swelling in joyous freedom, until the rocks and spires of Beech Cliff rose dimly on the horizon; white-winged sails began to flutter into sight; wharves and boat-houses came into view, and the travellers were back in the busy world of men again.
“It feels good to be on God’s own earth again,” said Brother Bart, as he set foot on the solid pier, gay just now with a holiday crowd; for the morning boat was in, and the “Cliff Dwellers,” as the residents of the old town were called at livelier seaside resorts, were out in force to welcome the new arrivals.
“This is something fine!” said Dud to Jim, as they made their way through the chatting, laughing throng, and caught the lilt of the music on the beach beyond, where bathers, reckless of the church bells’ call, were disporting themselves in the sunlit waves. “It’s tough, with a place like this so near, to be shut up on a desert island for a whole vacation. I say, Jim, let’s look up the Fosters after Mass, and see if we can’t get a bid to their house for a day or two. We’ll have some fun there.”
“I don’t know,” answered easy Jim. “Killykinick is good enough for me. You have to do so much fussing and fixing when you are with girls. Still, now we are here, we might as well look around us.”
So when Mass in the pretty little church was over, and Brother Bart, glad to be back under his well-loved altar light, lingered at his prayers, the boys, who had learned from Captain Jeb that they had a couple of hours still on their hands, proceeded to explore the quaint old town, with its steep, narrow streets, where no traffic policemen were needed; for neither street cars nor automobiles were allowed to intrude.
In the far long ago, Beach Cliff had been a busy and prosperous seaport town. The great sailing vessels of those days, after long and perilous voyage, made harbor there; the old shipmasters built solid homes on the island shores; its merchants grew rich on the whaling vessels, that went forth to hunt for these monsters of the great deep, and came back laden with oil and blubber and whalebone and ambergris. But all this was changed now. Steam had come to supplant the white wings that had borne the old ships on their wide ocean ways. As Captain Jeb said, “the airth had taken to spouting up ile,” and made the long whale hunts needless and unprofitable. But, though it had died to the busy world of commerce and trade, the quaint old island town had kept a charm all its own, that drew summer guests from far and near.
Dud and Jim made for the resident streets, where old Colonial mansions stood amid velvety lawns, and queer little low-roofed houses were buried in vines and flowers. But Dan and Freddy kept to the shore and the cliff, where the old fishermen had their homes, and things were rough and interesting. They stopped at an old weather-beaten house that had in its low windows all sorts of curious things—models of ships and boats, odd bits of pottery, rude carvings, old brasses and mirrors,—the flotsam and jetsam from broken homes and broken lives that had drifted into this little eddy.
The proprietor, a bent and grizzled old man, who stood smoking at the door, noticed the young strangers.
“Don’t do business on Sundays; but you can step in, young gentlemen, and look about you. ’Twon’t cost you a cent: and I’ve things you won’t see any-whar else on this Atlantic coast,—brass, pottery, old silver, old books, old papers, prints of rare value and interest. A Harvard professor spent two hours the other day looking over my collection.”