ou
please."

"My faith, I think you will be better on Sercq than on Brecqhou. But you
will be getting yourself drowned in the Gouliot, and that would be a sad
pity," said the Seigneur.

"But I can swim, M. le Seigneur, and I will be very, very careful."

"Well, well! You can have the boat, child. But if any ill comes of it,
remember, I shall feel myself to blame. So be careful for my sake also."

And so the yellow cockleshell became Carette's golden bridge, and
thereafter her comings and goings knew no bounds but her own wilful will
and the states of the tides and the weather.

Krok's ideas in the matter of seigneurial rights of flotsam and jetsam were
by no means as strict as his master's, especially where Carette was
concerned. In his mute, dog-like way he worshipped Carette. In case of
need, he would, I believe, have given his left hand in her service; and the
right, I think he would have kept for himself and me. He procured from
somewhere a great beam of ship's timber, and with infinite labour fixed it
securely in a crevice of the rocks, high up by the Gale de Jacob, with one
end projecting over the shelving rocks below. Then, with rope and pulley
from the same ample storehouse, he showed Carette how she could, with her
own unaided strength, hitch on her cockleshell and haul it up the cliff
side out of reach of the hungriest wave. He made her a pair of tiny sculls
too, and thenceforth she was free of the seas, and she flitted to and fro,
and up and down that rugged western coast, till it was all an open book to
her. But so venturesome was she, and so utterly heedless of danger, that we
all went in fear for her, and she laughed all our fears to scorn.

CHAPTER VII

HOW I SHOWED ONE THE WAY TO THE BOUTIQUES

Another scene stands out very sharply in my recollection of the boy and
girl of those early days, from the fact that it gave our Island folk a
saying which lasted a generation, and whenever I heard the saying it
brought the whole matter back to me.

"Show him the way to the Boutiques," became, in those days, equivalent to
"mislead him--trick him--deceive him"--and this was how it came about.

I can see the boy creeping slowly along the south side of Brecqhou in a
boat which was big enough to make him look very small. It was the smaller
of the two boats belonging to the farm, but it was heavily laden with
vraic. There had been two days of storm, the port at Brecqhou was full of
the floating seawe