CHAPTER VIIIWHAT THE TIDE BROUGHT IN
Fatherand Sally, Andy and Alice, were spending a morning down on the rocks.
The tide was out, and the jagged, uneven, rocky shore lay brown and dry under the hot summer sun. Soon the tide would turn and roll in again, dashing up higher and higher over the rocks until every one would be forced to run farther inland to escape the wash of the waves and the dashing spray.
But now the rocks were well out of water, and over them climbed Sally and Alice and Andy, hunting for treasures that the sea had left behind in little pools and hollows everywhere.
‘Here is seaweed,’ called Sally, holding up the long, wet, brown strands. ‘It is what the mermaids wear in their hair, Andy, you know.’
‘I don’t think my mermaid wore any,’ answeredAndy, who still liked to tell the story of how his mermaid, as he called her, had saved his boat, ‘but then her green cap was very tight and I couldn’t see her hair. Oh, Sally, Sally, what is this?’
Andy was dancing about a little pool as he pointed to something on its edge, as excited as if he saw another mermaid rising from its clear and shallow depths.
‘It is a crab,’ said Sally, laughing at Andy’s puzzled face, ‘a baby crab. See him run.’
And Andy and Sally laughed happily together as the little crab scuttled hastily away out of sight.
‘These are periwinkles,’ explained Sally, as she came upon Alice gingerly poking with a stick a number of small gray shells. ‘That shell is a house, and the periwinkle lives inside. When he goes walking he carries his house on his back.’
‘Sit very still for a moment,’ said Father, who had come up behind the little group, ‘and perhapsyou will see the periwinkles walking away.’
Sure enough, while Sally and Andy and Alice waited, scarcely winking an eyelash nor drawing a long breath, the procession moved slowly off, each periwinkle carrying his little gray house that did not look unlike the gray houses of Seabury Town itself.
‘If they were walking in the sand, each one would leave a little track, wouldn’t he, Father?’ said Sally, blowing upon the slowly moving houses as if to make their tenants hurry along.
‘I shouldn’t like to live all alone in a house,’ said Andy. ‘I shouldn’t like it at night.’
And Andy shook his head as he thought of his own little crib standing close beside his mother’s big bed.
‘Poor little periwinkle,’ said tender-hearted Alice. ‘Do you think he is ever lonely?’
‘No, indeed,’ answered Father. ‘See him walking off with his family now. He will tell every one he meets what an exciting morning he has had, how one little girl rapped on theroof of his house with a stick and another one blew on him until it almost gave him a cold in his head. Perhaps the periwinkles will give a party to-night and invite the crabs to come and hear all about it.’
This made every one laugh, and Sally asked, ‘What will they eat at the party?’
‘Jelly,’ answered Father promptly, ‘made by the jellyfish, of course.’
‘Oh, show us the jellyfish,’ cried Sally, jumping about on the rocks until it seemed as if she must tumble down. ‘Show us the jellyfish, Father.’
So Father led the way in the search for jellyfish, and when they were found, lying in pools of water here and there, it was seen at once that they had been well named.
‘They do look just like jelly,’ said Alice, ‘raspberry jelly, I think.’
‘But jelly doesn’t have “stingers,”’ objected Sally, keeping a respectful distance from the jellyfish’s long, waving ‘arms,’ that would‘sting like a bee,’ she told her friends, if they went too near.
‘Here is a sea anemone,’ said Father, pointing to a rose-colored, star-shaped form lying in a pool.
‘It looks like a flower,’ said Alice.
And so it did.
‘Touch it gently,’ said Father to Andy, who carried a little stick.
Very carefully Andy leaned over the pool, very gently he touched the anemone, and in an instant what had looked like a full-blown, brilliant flower now grew smaller and smaller, until it was not half its former size.
‘I don’t want to touch it,’ said Alice, her hands behind her back, ‘but I do want to fish. Miss Neppy said that if I brought a fish home she would cook it for my dinner.’
Now Alice and Sally and Andy had come down to the rocks this morning quite prepared to catch any number of fish.
Each one had a fishing rod made of a lilacswitch out by Father from the white-lilac bush that grew beside Sally’s kitchen door. And each one had fastened to the rod a long piece of string, on the end of which was tied a bent pin.
As they settled themselves in a row and prepared to fling their lines into the sea, you might have noticed that behind each fisherman stood a pail, a gay-colored tin pail used for digging in the sand, but equally useful for carrying home a large catch of fish.
‘Did you ever catch anything?’ asked Andy of Sally, who had lived all her life by the sea.
‘No, I haven’t yet,’ answered Sally truthfully, ‘but then I always think I may.’
‘There are whales in the sea,’ volunteered Alice. ‘The Bible says so. Oh, how I wish I could catch a whale and carry it home to surprise Miss Neppy and Mother!’
‘Whales are too big to carry home,’ instructed Sally. ‘I have seen pictures of them. Father, isn’t a whale too big for Alice to carry home?’
But Father was now sitting back in the shade,reading his morning paper, and the sound of Sally’s shrill little voice was carried away by the breeze.
Near by the blue waves glittered and danced, while farther out at sea sail-boats scudded before the wind, little motor boats chugged busily past, and stately yachts moved slowly along, dazzling white in the morning sun.
The fishermen fished on with never a bite, not even a nibble. They drew in their lines, they bent their pins a-fresh, they tossed out their lines again with many a whirl and twirl.
‘Do you think we will catch anything to-day?’ asked Andy, whose leg had begun to have a ‘crick’ in it from sitting still so long.
But just then Alice uttered a cry and pointed out into the water.
‘Look! Look!’ cried Alice. ‘It is a fish, a fish out there in the water. It is a whale, I know it is, a big blue whale.’
Sally and Andy followed Alice’s pointing finger. There on the surface of the waves theycould plainly see a number of objects, red and blue, that seemed to be swimming toward them at a rapid rate.
‘They look like people’s heads,’ said Sally.
‘Perhaps they are mermaids,’ murmured Andy.
‘I think that first blue one is a whale,’ insisted Alice.
Now all the fishermen were so excited that they dropped their rods and rose to their feet.
Sally waved her arms and called, ‘Father! Father!’
Andy and Alice could think of nothing better to do, so they, too, waved their arms and shouted, ‘Father! Father!’ as loud as ever they could.
Father heard. He folded his paper, and came slowly over the rocks toward the excited little group.
Yes, Father, too, saw the red and blue objects bounding along, dancing lightly over thewaves, and, with the children, wondered what they were.
The tide had turned. Each wave came higher up on shore, and already an eager bather or two had waded out into the rising water.
Soon a boy bather, gay in his red bathing-suit, saw the objects at which three pairs of hands were pointing and waving wildly. He paddled toward them, as they bobbed about, red and blue, and then with a laugh that made the children laugh, too, he set them bounding faster than ever over the waves toward the spot where Alice and Sally and Andy stood.
‘What are they? Oh, what do you think they are?’ asked Alice over and over again. ‘Do you think they can be whales?’
‘No, I don’t,’ replied Sally, wisely shaking her head. ‘They don’t look like whales to me. Why, I know what they are. They are balls!’
‘Balls?’ echoed Andy in a shout. ‘Oh, I love balls!’
And balls they were, great red and bluerubber balls, and what they were doing, sailing alone over the ocean, was a question hard for any one to answer.
The merry little boy bather waded back and caught the balls as they came bounding in to shore. He handed them up to the children, a red ball each to Andy and Sally, a big red ball, hard and full of bounce, you could see, while Alice wanted the blue ball so badly that she couldn’t help holding out her hands for it, so of course the boy gave the blue ball to her.
‘Where did they come from?’ asked Sally and Andy in a breath.
As for Alice, she didn’t ask any questions. She was rubbing her blue ball dry on her dress, with an extra loving little pat every now and then.
‘I am sure I can’t guess,’ was Father’s answer. ‘Perhaps I shall hear something about it later on. Play with them at any rate and have a good time.’
Now you cannot bounce a ball on sharppointed rocks, and Sally and Andy and Alice, each holding a ball in his arms, were making ready to scramble back to the mainland to try their new treasures, when there was a loud shout from the water that made every one turn round to see what it could mean.
A small motor boat was chuf-chuf-chuffing straight toward the point where they stood. And a man was standing in the bow of the boat waving his hat in the air and shouting at the top of his voice,
‘My balls! My balls! They are my balls! My balls!’
As Sally and Andy and Alice each held a ball, and even the merry boy bather had an extra ball in his hand that had just come bouncing gayly in on the waves, it was plain that the man was talking to them.
So Father called back—he could do nothing else—‘If they are your balls, come and get them.’
When Sally and Andy and Alice heard thesewords, they clutched their balls very tightly as if they would never let them go.
But now Father was speaking again, for the man in the boat was quite near.
‘How did your balls get in the water?’ called Father.
And the man shouted back, ‘The box they were in fell overboard and the cover came off. I bought them for my shop over in Rockport, and I was carrying them home when they fell overboard. I nearly lost a box of tin horns, too.’
‘If you have a shop, perhaps you will sell these balls to me,’ suggested Father. ‘Would you like that ball you have?’ he asked the boy bather.
But the boy bather shook his head.
‘No, I play baseball,’ said he.
And he tossed the ball he held back into the man’s boat.
‘I guess I can sell the balls to you,’ agreed the man, looking more cheerful at once. ‘I am glad to make a sale anywhere.’
When Sally and Alice and Andy heard this, they prepared at once to go home.
‘Let us put our balls into our pails,’ said Sally, ‘and bounce them when we get home.’
So each ball was popped into a pail. They fitted nicely except that they rose high over the top, round and plump and gay.
‘My pail is so full I am glad I left my shovel at home to-day,’ said Sally, admiring the effect of her new red ball in her bright green pail.
‘Perhaps people will think we are carrying home fish,’ suggested Andy, swinging his pail so hard it was well that his ball was a tight fit.
‘Perhaps they will think it is a whale,’ said Alice hopefully. ‘I would love to surprise Miss Neppy and my mother with a whale.’
‘Perhaps they will,’ said Sally kindly. ‘Anyway, it is the first time I ever caught anything when I went fishing, and I am glad it is a ball and not a fish, aren’t you?’