arrow path, whistling to keep up their
spirits and almost ready to cry for help if nothing more dangerous than
a moth fanned their pale cheeks in passing. And after this Mark had to
undo alone the nine gates between the Vicarage and Nancepean, though
Cass would go with him as far along his road as the last light of the
village could be seen, and what was more stay there whistling for as
long as Mark could hear the heartening sound.

But if these adventures demanded the companionship of Cass, the
inspiration of them was Mark's mother. Just as in the nursery games of
Lima Street it had always been she who had made it worth while to play
with his grenadiers, which by the way had perished in a troopship like
their predecessors the light dragoons a century before, sinking one by
one and leaving nothing behind except their cork-stands bobbing on the
waves.

Mrs. Lidderdale knew every legend of the coast, so that it was thrilling
to sit beside her and turn over the musty pages of the church registers,
following from equinox to equinox in the entries of the burials the
wrecks since the year 1702:

The bodies of fifteen seamen from the brigantine _Ann Pink_ wrecked
in Church Cove, on the afternoon of Dec. 19, 1757.

The body of a child washed into Pendhu Cove from the high seas
during the night of Jan. 24, 1760.

The body of an unknown sailor, the breast tattooed with a heart and
the initials M. V. found in Hanover Cove on the morning of March 3,
1801.

Such were the inscriptions below the wintry dates of two hundred years,
and for each one Mark's mother had a moving legend of fortune's malice.
She had tales too of treasure, from the golden doubloons of a Spanish
galleon wrecked on the Rose Bar in the sixteenth century to the silver
dollars of Portugal, a million of them, lost in the narrow cove on the
other side of the Castle Cliff in the lee of which was built St.
Tugdual's Church. At low spring tides it was possible to climb down and
sift the wet sand through one's fingers on the chance of finding a
dollar, and when the tide began to rise it was jolly to climb back to
the top of the cliff and listen to tales of mermaids while a gentle wind
blew the perfume of the sea-campion along the grassy slopes. It was here
that Mark first heard the story of the two princesses who were wrecked
in what was now called Church Cove and of how they were washed up on the
cliff and vowed to build a churc