Page:Henry B. Fuller - Bertram Cope's Year, 1919.djvu/93

 or two he got on his feet and made his way back across a yard of fine shingle to the sand itself. He was sputtering and gasping, and the long yellow hair, which usually lay in a flat clean sweep from forehead to occiput, now sprawled in a grotesque pattern round his temples.

“B-r-r! It is cold, sure enough. But jump in. The air will be all right. I’ll be back with you in a moment.”

Randolph advanced to the edge, and felt in turn. It was cold. But he meant to manage it here, just as he had managed with the sand-slopes.

Two heads bobbed on the water where but one had bobbed before. Ceremonially, at least, the rite was complete.

“It’s never so cold the second time,” declared Cope encouragingly. “One dip doesn’t make a swim, any more than one swallow——”

He flashed his soles in the sunlight and was once again immersed, gulping, in a maelstrom of his own making.

“Twice, to oblige you,” said Randolph. “But no more. I’ll leave the rest to the sun and the air.” Cope, out again, ran up and down the sands for a hundred feet or so. “I know something better than this,” he declared presently. He threw himself down and rolled himself in the abundance of fine, dry, clean sand.

“An arenaceous ulster—speaking etymologically,” he said. He came back to the clump of basswoods near which Randolph was sitting on a short length of