Page:In the Roar of the Sea.djvu/96

88 The boy jumped with pleasure, and caught her hand. "I may take Tib with me?" "Oh yes, certainly, dear."

Tib was a puppy that had been given to Jamie by one of his new acquaintances. The day was fresh. Clouds driving before the wind, now obscuring the sun and threatening rain, then clearing and allowing the sun to turn the sea green and gild the land. Owing to the breeze the sea was ruffled and strewn with breakers shaking their white foam. "I am going to show you something I have found, Ju," said the boy. "You will follow, will you not?" "Lead the way. What is it?" "Come and see. I found it by myself. I shan't tell any one but you." He conducted his sister down the cliffs to the beach of a cove. Judith halted a moment to look along the coast with its mighty, sombre cliffs, and the sea glancing with sun or dulled by shadow to Tintagel Head standing up at the extreme point to the northeast, with the white surf lashing and heaving around it. Then she drew her skirts together, and descended by the narrow path along which, with the lightness and confidence of a kid, Jamie was skipping.

"Jamie!" she said. "Have you seen?—there is a ship standing in the offing." "Yes; she has been there all the morning." Then she went further. The cove was small, with precipitous cliffs rising from the sand to the height of two to three hundred feet. The seagulls screamed and flashed to and fro, and the waves foamed and threw up their waters lashed into froth as white and light as the feathers on the gulls. In the concave bay the roar of the plunging tide reverberated from every side. Neither the voice of Jamie, when he shouted to his sister from some feet below, nor the barking of his little dog that ran with him, could be distinguished by her. The descent was rapid and rugged, yet not so precipitous but that it could be gone over by asses or mules. Evidence that these creatures had passed that way remained in the impression of their hoofs in the soil, wherever a soft stratum intervened between the harder shelves of the rock, and had crumbled on the path into clay.