"Be still, Meg, be still. Don't trouble me. Go and play. Young 'uns like you are good for naught else;" and so saying, Meg's grandmother turned fretfully toward the window of the cottage, and resumed her listless watching of the sea-gulls across the inlet, as they fluttered, dipped, and arose over the wavelets, picking their dinner from the shoals of little fish the mackerel had chased inshore.
"But I'm of some use, granny; you said so yesterday, when I fetched the blueberries. An' I'll go fur some more if you like. I know where there's lots of 'em—acres of 'em."
"Do as you please, child, but don't tease your granny," replied the old woman.
There was little need to tell Maggie, or "Meg," as she was generally called, to "do as she pleased," for in all of her short life of ten years she had never done otherwise. She had roamed unmissed all the days among the sand-hills of the beach, wading in the "mash" for lily pods, or hunting in the scrub for birds' eggs. Such a place as school had never been named to her. The alphabet was unknown to her, but she understood the rough talk of the fishermen, and could mend a net or 'tend a line with the best man among them.
Meg lived with her "granny" in a little unpainted hut made from ships' planking, and set among a few low twisted pines, within a short distance of a cove where Lucky Tom, her father, who was a pilot, kept his boats and moored his sloop, when not sailing out on the blue sea watching for ships to give him employment.
Meg's mother had died while she was a baby; her "granny" was almost always cross; so the child had grown up with but a single affection. It was all for her father, and he returned it in a rough, good-natured way. So these two were seldom apart when the pilot was ashore, and Meg came to be known among the beach people as "Lucky Tom's Shadow."
Now just why the pilot was called "Lucky Tom" does not appear: but it was said among the folks on the coast that fish would nibble at his hooks, and obligingly allow themselves to be caught by the dozen, when nobody else could catch even a porgy.
Near the cottage, Lucky Tom had raised the mast of a ship once wrecked on the bar, and made a platform at the top, with steps leading to it; and Meg was never so happy as when she sat high up in her "bird's nest," as she called it, with her father, and listened to his surprising yarns about foreign ports, while they scanned the horizon with a glass for incoming ships.
Meg tried hard to behave kindly toward her grandmother; but the old woman never smiled, and seldom troubled herself about Meg's goings or comings.
"She's purty certain to git 'round at meal-times, an' that's often enough," was about all she would say when Lucky Tom scolded about the child's "bringin' up."