then, as tea was over, the two
sisters made for the beach.

The four-roomed, weatherboard cottage, to which at a later date a
lean-to had been added, faced the bush: from the verandah there was a
wide view of the surrounding country. Between the back of the house and
the beach rose a huge sand-hill, sparsely grown with rushes and coarse
grass. It took you some twenty minutes to toil over this, and boots and
stockings were useless impedimenta; for the sand was once more of that
loose and shifting kind in which you sank at times up to the knees,
falling back one step for every two you climbed. But then, sand was the
prevailing note of this free and easy life: it bestrewed verandah and
floors; you carried it in your clothes; the beds were full of it; it
even got into the food; and you were soon so accustomed to its presence
that you missed the grit of it under foot, or the prickling on your
skin, did old Anne happen to take a broom in her hand, or thoroughly
re-make the beds.--When, however, on your way to the beach you had
laboriously attained the summit of the great dune, the sight that met
you almost took your breath away: as far as the eye could reach, the
bluest of skies melting into the bluest of seas, which broke its
foam-flecked edge against the flat, brown reefs that fringed the shore.
Then, downhill--with a trip and a flounder that sent the sand
man-high--and at last you were on what Laura and Pin thought the most
wonderful beach in the world. What a variety of things was there!
Whitest, purest sand, hot to the touch as a zinc roof in summer; rocky
caves, and sandy caves hung with crumbly stalactites; at low tide, on
the reef, lakes and ponds and rivers deep enough to make it unnecessary
for you to go near the ever-angry surf at all; seaweeds that ran
through the gamut of colours: brown and green, pearl-pink and
coral-pink, to vivid scarlet and orange; shells, beginning with tiny
grannies and cowries, and ending with the monsters in which the
breakers had left their echo; the bones of cuttlefish, light as paper,
and shaped like javelins. And, what was best of all, this beach
belonged to them alone; they had not to share its treasures with
strangers; except the inhabitants of the cottage, never a soul set foot
upon it.

The chief business of the morning was to bathe. If the girls were alone
and the tide full, they threw off their clothes and ran into a sandy,
shallow pool, where the water never came above their