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Angus looked from the end of Noirmont Terrace straight down to the sands and saw in the distance the sunset air filled with wheeling gulls, a group of boys playing football on the wide level, and somewhat nearer, a slender girl of fourteen, dressed in black, with long fair hair floating over her shoulders.
So day by day the spell deepened with Louie, and for another week there was delightful loneliness with this lover of hers strolls down through the swampy woods hunting for moss to frame the prints he had brought home uninjured, and which were to be part of the furnishing of their future home; others across the salt meadows for the little red samphire stems to pickle; sails in the float down river and in the creeks, where the tall thatch parted by the prow rustled almost overhead, and the gulls came flying and piping around them: here and there, they two alone, pouring out thought and soul to each other, and every now and then glancing shyly at those days, that did not seem so very far away, when they should be sailing together through foreign parts; for Louie's father, the old fisherman, was all her household, and a maiden aunt, who earned her livelihood in nursing the sick and attending the dead, would be glad to come any day and take Louie's place in the cottage.
It was the next night that Lethway kissed her. He had left her alone most of the day, and by sheer gravitation of loneliness she and the boy drifted together. All day long they ranged the ship, watched a boxing match in the steerage, fed bread to the hovering gulls from the stern. They told each other many things.
Gulls here and there, winnowing the air on easy wing, are brought into striking relief; and every stroke of the paddles of Indian hunters in their canoes is told by a quick, glancing flash. Bird choirs in the grove are scarce heard as they sweeten the brooding stillness; and the sky, land, and water meet and blend in one inseparable scene of enchantment.
He was pledged to set his face westward ho! but the zest was gone out of the enterprise. He leaned over a gate, and watched the gulls fishing in the river. Johnnie did not hear a light step coming down the meadow towards him; no sound disturbed his melancholy reflections. "Jack!" murmured a soft voice. The young man started as though an arrow had struck him.
The gurgling of the water as it ran over the tops of his jack-boots, and the floundering P made to recover himself, alarmed two gulls, and they flew, screaming, into the air. We crouched to the bare rock; and these two sentinels, not distinguishing us from the colour of their roosting place, took a few gyrations, and then re-perched themselves on the rock.
Cormorants dived under the long rollers that came crashing in from the Pacific; gulls wheeled and screamed in the soft wind; alert little birds darted here and there with incredible swiftness, leaving tiny footprints across the ribs and furrows of the wet sand. Far to the southward a dark barrier of mountains rose out of the sea.
The monstrosity of the whole adventure unmasked itself of a sudden; travelling to find a bay they had heard of on the chance of finding a ship a ship on a coast where ships were scarcely to be found. And even if they found the bay they could not wait for a ship. Here there was no food, with the exception of rabbits and gulls. The ship would have to be there, waiting for them.
The temple of the gulls is now thronged with votaries as much as that of superstition formerly was; human reason is still a slave to the most tyrannical prejudices; and certainly, there is no ready way to excite general attention and admiration, than to deal in the mysterious and the marvellous. The visionary system of Jacob Böhman has latterly been revived in some parts of Germany.
"Look thou, Ambrose, thou art my sister's son, and fool though I be, thou art bound in duty to me, and I to have charge of thee, nor will I for the sake of thy father and mother have thee lying I know not where, among gulls, and cutpurses, and beguilers of youth here in this city of London.
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