Soon, however, weariness once more came upon them, and they desired to have a seat. Squatting upon the ground is an attitude only easy to savages, and always irksome to those accustomed to habits of civilised life, and to sitting upon chairs. They looked about for something upon which they might sit but nothing appeared suitable. There were neither logs nor large stones; for the beach, as well as the adjacent shore, was composed of fine drift sand, and no trees seemed to have fallen near the spot.
“I have it!” exclaimed Henry, after puzzling his brains a bit, his eye guiding him to a settlement of the difficulty. “The shells—the big oyster shells—the very things for us to sit upon, sister Nell.”
As he spoke, he stooped down and commenced turning over one of the shells of the immense bivalve—both of which had been hitherto lying with their concave side uppermost. It was nigh as much as the boy, still weak, could do to roll it over, though Helen, seeing the difficulty, laid hold with her little hands and assisted him.
Both the huge “cockles” were speedily capsized; and their convex surfaces rising nearly a foot above the level of the ground, gave the young people an excellent opportunity of getting seated.
Both sat down—each upon a shell—laughing at the odd kind of stools thus conveniently provided for them.
They had not been long in their sedentary attitude, when a circumstance occurred which told them how unsafe a position they had chosen. They were conversing without fear, when Henry all at once felt something strike him on the arm, and then, with a loud crash, drop down upon the shell close under his elbow, chipping a large piece out of it.
His first impression was that some one had thrown a stone at him. It had hit him on the arm, just creasing it; but on looking at the place where he had been hit, he saw that the sleeve of his jacket was split, or rather torn, from shoulder to elbow, as if a sharp-tooth curry-comb had been drawn violently along it. He felt pain, moreover, and saw blood upon his shirt underneath!
He looked quickly around to ascertain who had thus rudely assailed him—anxiously, too, for he was in some dread of seeing a savage spring from the bushes close by. On turning, he at once beheld the missile that had rent his jacket-sleeve lying on the sand beside him. It was no stone, but a round or slightly oval-shaped ball, as big as a ten-pound shot, of a deep-green colour, and covered all over with spurs like the skin of a hedgehog!
He at once saw that it had not been thrown at him by any person; for, with the sharp, prickly protuberances thickly set all over it, no one could have laid hand upon it. Clearly it had fallen from the tree overhead. Helen had perceived this sooner than he; for sitting a little way off, she had seen the huge ball drop in a perpendicular direction—though it had descended with the velocity of lightning.
Beyond doubt, it was some fruit or nut, from the tree under which they were seated. From the way in which the jacket-sleeve had suffered, as well as the skin underneath—to say nothing of the piece chipped out of the shell—it was evident, that had the ponderous pericarp fallen upon Henry’s skull, it would have crushed it as a bullet would the shell of an egg.