Daybreak.
Chapter VI.
Presentiments.
Mr. Granger's family took the full benefit of their holiday at the seaside. They rose before the lark, and watched the days come in: radiant, solemn mornings, all light and silence; tender, mist-veiled dawns, less like day than a dream of day; and angry, magnificent sunrises, blazing with stormy colors all over the sky, soon to be quenched in a fine gray fall of rain.
They lay in hammocks slung out under the pine-trees, till nature adopted them for her own, and little wild creatures came and went about them unscared.
"Margaret," Mrs. Lewis called, one day, out of her hammock over to the other, "you remember how the foxes went to St. Francis—wasn't it St. Francis?—and held out their paws to shake hands with him, and said, 'How do you do, St. Francis?' and he gave them his hand, and said, 'How do you do?"'
"I remember nothing of the kind," was the indignant reply. "But I know that Robinson Cru—"
"O fie!" cries the little lady. "Why won't you own that my legend is beautiful and sublime, whether true or not? And it will be true when the kingdom comes for which all good people pray. For the last hour I have been trying to get acquainted with a squirrel; but just as I thought that he understood me, and as I was about to offer my hand to him, the little wretch darted away. At this moment he is perched in the very top of a pine-tree, and peering down at me as if I were a hyena. Alas!"
They wandered on the beach at evening, singing, talking, silent; or if in merry mood, skooning little flat stones over the water, and counting how many wave-tips they would trip before falling.