FullReads

“Now,” he said, “we’re just going to let her take her own way for an hour.”

This sailor-like resolution pleased his companion mightily, so the boat was allowed to wheel lazily, and curtsey to the slight waves as they set to the shore. Then the young people chatted softly, and forgot the time.

Now those who have watched the humours of autumn weather by the coast will have noticed that very often after a warm breeze has been blowing for hours, there will suddenly come a chill easterly waft. This will be followed by a steady cold wind. The trees are blown white, the grass is black with shadows, and the sea springs up like magic into a short nasty “lipper.” Within half-an-hour the lipper has gathered size, and in a terribly short time there are ugly, medium-sized waves bowling fiercely and regularly westward. The change mostly comes just about an hour after the tide has turned. Ellington and his companion were talking on heedlessly, when the girl, interrupting him in the middle of a speech, said, shivering, “How cold it has turned!”

“Yes,” returned Ellington, “it often comes like that. Do you see how she’s beginning to caper? So, there! Softly, softly!” he cried, as though he were talking to a horse. A spirt of water had jerked over the boat’s side.

He ran up his sail, and as the little craft swung on her light heels, and drew away to the west, he said, “I wish I hadn’t got you into this mess. But never mind, I don’t think it’s more than a wetting and a fuss when we get home, at the worst of it.”

Mr. Casely was sitting by his fire in the sanded kitchen. Excepting two very old fellows, he was the only man left in the village that afternoon, for all the other men and lads had gone north on the morning tide. His noble face had got the beginnings of a few new lines since we first saw him; his mouth was sorrowful, and his brows fell heavier than ever.

A woman came in rather hurriedly, and said, “Thou’d better come out a minute, honey. The sea’s come on very coarse, and the young Squire’s boat’s gettin’ badly used out there, about a mile to the east’ard.”

“Who’s in her?”

“The young Squire and his lass.”

“I’ll be out directly. Has he ever made the landin’ before?”

“Yes, but Tom’s Harry was always with him.”

When Casely stepped to the cliff edge, he saw that matters were a little awkward. The boat was as yet in no very great danger, but the real pinch would not come till Ellington tried to land. For two miles along the coast there was not a single yard of shore where you dared beach a boat, excepting just opposite the village. Here there was a broad gap through the jagged reef which fringed the shore, and through this gap the fishermen’s boats had shot in fair or foul weather for more generations than men could remember.

Casely said to one of the women–

“He’ll be all right if he comes in to the north of the Cobbler. If he doesn’t, it’s a bad job.”

The Cobbler’s Seat was one of a pair of huge rocks, which lay right in the very gap wherethrough the boats had to run in. A progressive people would have had the impediments blasted away, but the fisher-folk were above all things conservative, and so the Cobbler remained year after year to make the inward passage exciting. When the tide was running in hard, a boat attempting the south passage was certain to be taken in a nasty swirling eddy, and dashed heavily against the big stone. When any sea was on, the run in required much nicety of handling.

Ellington had been told long ago that he must keep the church tower and the flagstaff in one if he wanted to hit the gap fairly. He carried out his instruction as well as he knew how.