The white houses are builded in a fashion the most disorderly at the edge of the tickle, strung clear from the narrows to the Lost Soul and straying somewhat upon the slopes, with the scrawny-legged flakes clinging to the bare declivities and the stages squatted at the water-side; but some houses, whose tenants are solitary folk made morose by company, congregate in the remoter coves––where the shore is the shore of the open sea and there is no crowd to trouble––whence paths scramble over the hills to the Tickle settlement. My uncle’s cottage sat respectably, even with some superiority, upon a narrow neck of rock by the Lost Soul, outlooking, westerly, to sea, but in the opposite direction dwelling in a way more intimate and fond upon the unruffled water of Old Wives’ Cove, within the harbor, where rode the Shining Light.
“An’ there she’ll lie,” he was used to saying, with a grave and mysteriously significant wink, “until I’ve sore need o’ she.”
“Ay,” said they, “or till she rots, plank an’ strand.”
“An she rots,” says my uncle, “she may rot: for 73 she’ll sail these here waters, sound or rotten, by the Lord! an I just put her to it.”
Unhappy, then, perhaps, Twin Islands, in situation and prospect; but the folk of that harbor, who deal barehanded with wind and sea to catch fish, have this wisdom: that a barren, a waste of selfish water, a low, soggy sky have nothing to do with the hearts of men, which are independent, in love and hope and present content, of these unfeeling things. We were seafaring men, every jack of the place, with no knowledge of a world apart from green water, which forever confronted us, fashioning our lives; but we played the old comedy as heartily, with feeling as true and deep, the same fine art, as you, my gentlefolk! and made a spectacle as grateful to the gods for whom the stage (it seems) is set.
And there is a road from the Tickle to the sea––to an outer cove, high-cliffed, frothy, sombre, with many melancholy echoes of wind and breakers and listless human voices, where is a cluster of hopeless, impoverished homes. ’Tis a wilful-minded path, lingering indolently among the hills, artful, intimate, wise with age, and most indulgently secretive of its soft discoveries. It is used to the lagging feet of lovers. There are valleys in its length, and winding, wooded stretches, kindly places; and there are arching alders along the way to provide a seclusion yet more tender. In the moonlight ’tis a path of enchantment––a way (as I know) of pain and high delight: of a wandering hope that tantalizes 74 but must in faith, as we are men, be followed to its catastrophe. I have suffered much of ecstasy and despair upon that path. ’Tis the road to Whisper Cove.
Judith dwelt at Whisper Cove....