mong many threats, could beat
on this islet so terrifically.

"The sight so vanquished Farrell that he yielded the stick over to
me, obedient as a child. I thrust it back in its socket, hauled
sheet and fetched her up close to the wind outside the surges. . . .
Without a word said, he turned to pointing out this and that inlet
between the reefs where there seemed a chance to slip through.

"For two miles at least we fended off in this way, until we came to
the base of the hill which, from seaward, had appeared so curiously
truncated. As we opened its steep-to sides, they rounded gradually
into a high curve at the skyline, and, at the base, into a foreshore
of tumbled rock through which ran a cleft with still water protected
by sheer rocks--a narrow slit, but worth risking with the wind to
drive us straight through. So I upped helm on the heave of a comber,
and drove her for it, the walls of rock so close on either hand that
twice the end of our short boom brushed them before Farrell, who held
the sheet, could avoid touching. . . . And then, rushed by a heave of
the swell through this gorge, we were shot into a round lake of the
bluest water I ever set eyes on; a lakelet, rather; calm as a pond
except by the entrance, where the waves, broken and spent, spread
themselves in long ripples that melted and were gone.

"You know Lulworth Cove? Well, imagine Lulworth, with a narrower
entrance, its water blue as a sapphire shot with amethystine violet,
its cliffs taller, steeper, hung with matted creeper and, high aloft,
holding the heaven in a three-part circle almost as regular as you
could draw with a pair of compasses. We were floating in the cup of
a dead volcano, broken on the seaward side; and broken many hundreds
of years ago--for on our starboard hand, by the edge of the rent,
swept down a slope of turf, cropped by the gales, green as an English
park; with a thread of a stream dropping to a small wilderness of
ferns, and, through this, to plash upon a miniature beach of pink
sand, on the edge of which the sea scarcely lapped. Sea-birds of
many kinds circled and squawked overhead. Yet it was not our boat
that had frightened them.

"They had risen in alarm at the sound of barking, high up the slope.
A dog came leaping down it, tore through the fern, and, as our boat
drew to shore, raced to and fro by the water's edge, barking wildly
in an ecstasy of welcome. A yellow dog, Roddy--a largish yellow
dog--and, as