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Dunure lies close under the steep hill: a haven among the rocks, a breakwater in consummate disrepair, much apparatus for drying nets, and a score or so of fishers' houses. Hard by, a few shards of ruined castle overhang the sea, a few vaults, and one tall gable honeycombed with windows. The snow lay on the beach to the tide-mark.
I then scooped out a hollow in the sand, a little above the tide-mark, and filling it with water, pushed him into it, thus securing him for the present.
"This seaweed is one of the biggest assets the farmers have," he said to Roger. "You'll enjoy being here in February when the great vraic harvest comes. The farmers go down to the shore with carts and a sort of sickle. At low tide the southern shore is black with people cutting the seaweed from the rocks. The carts are used to carry it up beyond tide-mark.
He felt himself more incommoded in this crowd than he desired, especially as his wife shared it with him, and began to look among the scattered trees which fringed the shores, down almost to the tide-mark, to see if he could discern any by-path which might carry them more circuitously, but more pleasantly, to the city, and afford them at the same time, what was their principal object in the East, strange sights, or adventures of chivalry.
After breakfast Captain Kittridge took the two children down to the cove, to investigate the state of his boat and tar-kettle, set high above the highest tide-mark. The sun had risen gloriously, the sky was of an intense, vivid blue, and only great snowy islands of clouds, lying in silver banks on the horizon, showed vestiges of last night's storm.
I found an empty bottle among the dry litter and drift above the tide-mark, sole relic, as far as could be seen there, of man. No message was in the bottle. The black bottle itself was forlornly the message, but it lay there unregarded by the bright immemorial genius of that coast. Yet it settled one doubt. This was not a land which had never known man. It had merely forgotten it had known him.
The sand at their feet alternated in veins of umber brown, and ashes of roses; while the vermillion of the rowan berries made a vivid and gorgeous contrast to the glaucous green of the leafage. Little ripples came upon the bright, pink sand that fringed the unvarying tide-mark.
"Fellows," said he, "it's beautiful over there; the grass is so green, and the water so cool; I am tired of marching, and I reckon I'll cross over and camp." Then he died. We scooped out a shallow hole above tide-mark, and laid him in it, and piled over him stones from the wash. Then we went back to the beach, very solemn, to talk it over.
One morning, trembling with excitement, eye and ear on the alert, as a high-spirited horse enters a strange pasture, he ventured past the junction of bush and tide-mark, and down the unknown beach beyond. He filled his hands with the first pebbles he found, but noticing the plentiful supply on the ground ahead of him, dropped them and went on; there were other things to interest him.
The speedy wind tossed and teased the sea nearer and nearer, till I was surrounded by a gulf of milky green foam. As the tide rolled in I retreated, stepping back from rock to rock, round which the waves curled and hissed, baffled in their attempt to climb over me. I stopped on the verge of the tide-mark; the sea was seeking me and I must wait.
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