s rocks
and, free from their buttressing, prance exultantly to four bells
and a jingle out into the surgent tumult of the roaring sea. Wow!
but the fancy sets your blood to bubbling and your pulse to
swinging in rhythm with the long surges that leap about Minot's
and froth white over Chest ledge and the Willies, that come on to
drown the inner Osher rocks in exultant whirlpools and fluff the
loose stones of the beach into a foam that ripples over the
breakwater into the road that snuggles behind it.

But that is when the wind is east and really blows, when November
has stripped the oak and hickory upper works of the cruiser bare
of leaves and she stands grim in her gray war-paint, ready for the
winter's battles. Now she is gay in summer greenery and many a
string of flower signals flutters from mast head and signal yard.
You must go astern to get the wind in your face, for now it sings
gently in from the west across a mile of salt marsh, pools of
imprisoned tide where night-herons feed and tiny crabs and
cobblers scurry to shelter beneath the mud at the jar of your
footfall, winding creeks that twice a day brim with silver water,
and levels of quivering marsh grass, to Cohasset harbor and the
green hillsides of the Jerusalem road.

The island is an island by courtesy only at this time of year,
aground in the green marsh. The bashful tides of summer yearn
shyly toward it, and twice every twenty-four hours stretch soft
white arms up the creeks from Cohasset harbor to the east and the
west and fondle it. They hold it close at the hour of flood, but
hand does not clasp hand about it, and the dry sand that links it
to the beach and the breakwater is not wet. When the autumn winds
shall come and the sea shakes itself out of its summer lethargy
and asserts its power and will not be denied, it is different. At
such times it roars over the beach and the breakwater and drowns
the white sands that have kept the hands of its summer tides
apart. It marches deep green up Cohasset harbor and brims the
slender creeks. It passes their limits at a leap, and swirls in
defiant, dogged depths over the drowned marshes. Then the island
is an island in very truth, and the sea takes his love upon his
broad bosom and rocks it, not always so tenderly. No man can guess
the power of the floods and the deep sea currents herded by an
easterly gale till he has seen the leaping of the flood tide at
such a time.

Now it is a time of July gentlenes