e done this often;
but tho fishing be a fine pastime, the podley is scarce to be regarded
as a dainty for the table; and it was a point of honor that a boy
should eat all that he had taken. Or again, you might climb the Law,
where the whale's jawbone stood landmark in the buzzing wind, and
behold the face of many counties, and the smoke and spires of many
towns, and the sails of distant ships. You might bathe, now in the
flaws of fine weather, that we pathetically call our summer, now in a
gale of wind, with the sand scourging your bare hide, your clothes
thrashing abroad from underneath their guardian stone, the froth of
the great breakers casting you headlong ere it had drowned your knees.
Or you might explore the tidal rocks, above all in the ebb of springs,
when the very roots of the hills were for the nonce discovered;
following my leader from one group to another, groping in slippery
tangle for the wreck of ships, wading in pools after the abominable
creatures of the sea, and ever with an eye cast backward on the march
of the tide and the menaced line of your retreat. And then you might
go Crusoeing, a word that covers all extempore eating in the open air;
digging perhaps a house under the margin of the links, kindling a
fire of the sea-ware, and cooking apples there--if they were truly
apples, for I sometimes suppose the merchant must have played us off
with some inferior and quite local fruit, capable of resolving, in the
neighborhood of fire, into mere sand and smoke and iodin; or perhaps
pushing to Tantallon, you might lunch on sandwiches and visions in the
grassy court, while the wind hummed in the crumbling turrets; or
clambering along the coasts, ear geans[66] (the worst, I must suppose,
in Christendom) from an adventurous gean tree that had taken root
under a cliff, where it was shaken with an ague of east wind, and
silvered after gales with salt, and grew so foreign among its bleak
surroundings that to eat of its produce was an adventure in itself.

[Footnote 66: Wild cherries.]

These are things that I recall with interest; but what my memory
dwells upon the most, I have been all this while withholding. It was a
sport peculiar to the place, and indeed to a week or so of our two
months' holiday there. Maybe it still flourishes in its native spot;
for boys and their pastimes are swayed by periodic forces inscrutable
to man; so that tops and marbles reappear in their due season, regular
like the sun and m