'One army of the living God,
To his command we bow;
Part of his host have crossed the flood
And part are crossing now.
. . . . . .
'His militant embodied host,
With wishful looks we stand,
And long to see that happy coast,
And reach the heavenly land.
'E'en now, by faith, we join our hands
With those that went before;
And greet the blood-besprinkled bands
On the eternal shore.'"
CHAPTER XXXI.
LONG CLAMS.
There was a soft ring in Lois's voice; it might be an echo of the trumpets and cymbals of which she had been speaking. Yet not done for effect; it was unconscious, and delicate as indescribable, for which reason it had the greater power. The party remained silent for a few minutes, all of them; during which a killdeer on the fence uttered his little shout of gratulation; and the wild, salt smell coming from the Sound and the not distant ocean, joined with the silence and Lois's hymn, gave a peculiar impression of solitude and desolation to at least one of the party. The cart entered an enclosure, and halted before a small building at the edge of the shore, just above high-water mark. There were several such buildings scattered along the shore at intervals, some enclosed, some not. The whole breadth of the Sound lay in view, blinking under the summer sun; yet the air was far fresher here than it had been in the village. The tide was half out; a wide stretch of wet sand, with little pools in the hollows, intervened between the rocks and the water; the rocks being no magnificent buttresses of the land, but large and small boulders strewn along the shore edge, hung with seaweed draperies; and where there were not rocks there was a growth of rushes on a mud bottom. The party were helped out of the cart one by one, and the strangers surveyed the prospect.
"'Afar in the desert,' this is, I declare," said the gentleman.
"Might as well be," echoed his wife. "Whatever do you come here for?" she said, turning to Lois; "and what do you do when you are here?"
"Get some clams and have supper."