Page:Comin' Thro' the Rye (1898).djvu/66

58 morrow. Sleep binds me so safely though, that on Jack's calling me, I am scandalized to find it as late as six. What a lot of time we have wasted already!

In half an hour we are out on the beach and among the rocks, making queer discoveries; for instance, that shrimps and crabs do not grow scarlet but drab; also that the saying, "stick like a limpet," has a sound, healthy truth of its own that many proverbs have not; also that the seaweed-covered rocks have a remarkable knack of slipping away from our feet, compelling us to turn somersaults more rapid than elegant. We hunt for and find delicate shells, curious rose-hued freaks of Neptune, and we muse over them, marvelling in what sea-palace the carver lurks who casts up to us such dainty and mysterious shapes. We hold the bigger ones to our ears, and listen intently to the faint murmur that must, we think, so exactly represent the shoaling noise the sea makes at a great distance. We have listened to the same murmur before at Silverbridge, and nurse always told us it was the sea that we heard.

After breakfast we accompany Amberley and our sisters in a sober trot through the one long street that forms the town of Periwinkle, and sit down on the shingle where, apparently, the beauty and fashion (!) of the place do congregate, for no other purpose than to watch the rows of fat and lean kine who are taking their daily dip in the sea hard by, bobbing up and down in the sun like seals, with snaky locks of hair clinging round their cheeks, and tight, sticky bathing-gowns that most lavishly display their charms, or the lack of them.

Jack and I have a hot dispute as to whether a very lean woman or a very fat one looks worst in the water. I say the former, he says the latter, and implores me on no account to submit my person to the public gaze without at least six thick bathing-gowns put on, like an old clothesman's hats, one above the other.