ps. 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 neighbourhood of fire, into mere sand and
smoke and iodine; 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 coast, eat geans[17] (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.

There are mingled some dismal memories with so many that were joyous. Of
the fisher-wife, for instance, who had cut her throat at Canty Bay; and
of how I ran with the other children to the top of the Quadrant, and
beheld a posse of silent people escorting a cart, and on the cart, bound
in a chair, her throat bandaged, and the bandage all bloody--horror!--the
fisher-wife herself, who continued thenceforth to hag-ride my thoughts,
and even to-day (as I recall the scene) darkens daylight. She was lodged
in the little old gaol in the chief street; but whether or no she died
there, with a wise terror of the worst, I never inquired. She had been
tippling; it was but a dingy tragedy; and it seems strange and hard that,
after all these years, the poor crazy sinner should be still pilloried on
her cart in the scrap-book of my memory. Nor shall I readily