a gale of wind blowing, forbidding you
to go to school. But even in fine weather one could always look forward
to Saturday and Sunday, each a whole holiday.

It was Saturday. The three had opened their eyes soon after daybreak
and lay in their cots "chirruping," as their mother called it--talking,
planning out a campaign of adventures for the long two days before
them. The sun shone through their nursery window, which faced the East.
They had curled themselves to sleep before the great fog came up and
covered the Islands, and the sound of guns had neither awakened them
nor reached their dreams. They awoke to a clear morning sky, and while
they chatted, waiting the order to tumble out and dress, their father
looked in at the nursery door and astonished and excited them with news
of a great steamer which had entered the Roads in the night and was
already lifting anchor to pursue her voyage.

From the hill above the farmhouse they watched her, after breakfast, as
she steamed past the southern point of the island, nosed her way slowly
through Chough Sound, between Inniscaw and St. Lide's, and so headed
away to the northward until her smoke lay in a low trail on the
horizon. They had never before seen a steamer of her size.

Thus strangely began a day which the three had still stranger cause to
remember. They had planned to take their dinner wrapped in their
handkerchiefs and climb to the old tombs on the hill overlooking
Brefar, then to play at being Aztecs, from hints which Annet had dug
out of an old History of Mexico on her mother's bookshelf, and at
hiding treasure from the Spaniards, whose ships were to come sailing
through the Off Islands. Having concealed their hoard, they were either
to descend upon the Western Bay, which they called The Porth, and there
offer a bloody resistance to the invaders, or (this was Annet's notion,
which for the present she kept to herself) to wait until the north
channel dried and make a desperate escape across the sands to Brefar.
The trouble was, she could not be sure of low water being early enough
to let them dash across and back before dusk again. She was a brave
girl--a great deal braver, at least in these adventures, than her
sister Linnet; but she had to bear in mind that Matthew Henry was but
five years old and easily tired, and also that if they arrived home
after dusk her mother would be anxious and her father angry. So she
nursed the project in her own heart, and when the th