waists, and where
it was safe to let the breakers dash over them. But if the tide were
low, the boys bathed, too, and then Pin and Laura tied themselves up in
old bathing-gowns that were too big for them, and all went in a body to
the "Half-Moon Hole". This pool, which was about twenty feet long and
ten to fifteen deep, lay far out on the reef, and, at high tide, was
hidden beneath surf and foam; at low water, on the other hand, it was
like a glass mirror reflecting the sky, and so clear that you could see
every weed that waved at the bottom. Having cast off your shoes, you
applied your soles gingerly to the prickles of the rock; then
plop!--and in you went. Pin often needed a shove from behind, for
nowhere, of course, could you get a footing; but Laura swam with the
best. Some of the boys would dive to the bottom and bring up weeds and
shells, but Laura and Pin kept on the surface of the water; for they
had the imaginative dread common to children who know the sea well--the
dread of what may lurk beneath the thick, black horrors of seaweed.

Then, after an hour or so in the water, home to dinner, hungry as
swagmen, though the bill of fare never varied: it was always rabbit for
dinner, crayfish for tea; for the butcher called only once a week, and
meat could not be kept an hour without getting flyblown. The rabbits
were skinned and in the stew-pot before they were cold; the crayfish
died an instant death: one that drove the blood to Laura's head, and
made Pin run away and cry, with her fingers to her ears; for she
believed the sizzling of the water, as the fish were dropped in, to be
the shriek of the creatures in their death-agony.

Except in bathing, the girls saw little of the boys. Both were afraid
of guns, so did not go out on the expeditions which supplied the
dinner-table; and old Anne would not allow them to join the crayfishing
excursions. For these took place by night, off the end of the reef,
with nets and torches; and it sometimes happened, if the surf were
heavy, that one of the fishers was washed off the rocks, and only
hauled up again with considerable difficulty.

Laura took her last peep at the outside world, every evening, in the
brief span of time between sunset and dark. Running up to the top of
one of the hills, and letting her eyes range over sky and sea, she
would drink in the scents that were waking to life after the burning
heat of the day: salt water, warmed sand and seaweeds, ti-scrub,
sour