His wish to lie there in the sunshine, with the blue sky above him and the noise of the water in his ears, led him to dash across the dripping space between when the wave fell back, even though he must scramble out of the way of the returning water.
In a few minutes he was deep in an enchanting day-dream, which, to his subsequent peril, soon changed to sleep.
The tide was rising. A few drops of spray, falling upon his face from a great breaker, awoke him. On the instant he was wide awake and looking desperately about. Then he laughed to think that the breakers were reaching for him—that they would have had him fast in the trap had he slept much longer; for, in a glance, he thought he had made sure that his escape from the rock was not yet cut off. But his laugh was touched with some embarrassment when he found, upon trial, that the sea had blocked the path by which he had reached the foot of Shag Cliff.
"I must go 'tother way," he thought.
There was no other way; to right and to left the sea was breaking against overhanging juts of rock. He could pass from jut to jut, but he could round neither.
"Sure, I'll be late for dinner," he thought; "an' dad won't like it."
It was all very well to exclaim vexatiously, but he was forced to abandon the hope of returning by way of the foot of the cliffs. The tide had cut him off.
"I'll scale Shag Cliff," he determined.
He was not alarmed; the situation was awkward, but it promised the excitement of an adventure, and for a time he was rather glad that he had fallen asleep. To scale the two hundred feet of Shag Cliff—that was something to achieve! His father would say that he was "narvy," and forget that he had kept him from his dinner. Scale Shag Cliff, by all means!
He knew well enough that he had but to seek higher ground and wait for the tide to fall, if he wanted an unexciting return; but it pleased him to make believe that his situation was desperate—that the rising water would overwhelm him if he did not escape over the brow of the cliff: an indulgence which his imagination did not need half an hour later. When he looked up, however, to choose a path of ascent, he found that, from where he stood, close against the cliff at the base, there seemed to be no path at all.