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If it was sometimes weariful to me, who was there but a month or two, you may fancy what it was to her who dwelt in that same desert all the year round, with the sheep and flying sea-gulls, and the Merry Men singing and dancing in the Roost! It was half-flood when I got the length of Aros; and there was nothing for it but to stand on the far shore and whistle for Rorie with the boat.
"All ready, sir," replied the other; "it's now more than half-flood; in three hours we can drop down the river with the first of the ebb, and if this breeze holds we'll be in blue water before noon to-morrow." "Hallo, doctor, is that yourself?" said the captain, whose eye had for some moments rested on Will. "It is," said the youth, extending his hand, which the other grasped and shook warmly.
"And I told them that, when they had finished, they might turn in for an hour or two. They must be pretty well done up with their hard day's work, and we can do nothing more now until after half-flood. How are you feeling now, old fellow? Sanderson tells me you got a very ugly clip over the head to-day in our little boxing match with the felucca.
As there is no getting into the cove with a boat, from between half-ebb to half-flood, we could get off no water in the afternoon. However, there is a very good landing-place, without it, near the southern point, where boats can get ashore at all times of the tide. Here some of the officers landed after dinner, where they found the surgeon, who had been robbed of his gun.
At a little more than half-flood in fine weather the seamless ocean joins over the reef, and at high-water springs it is buried sixteen feet.
But I wasn't so busy with my hooks and lines but that I found time to ascertain that the ebb-stream runs at a rate of about four knots at half-tide; and just abreast of us it flows to seaward at the rate of about one knot at half-flood; the salt water flowing into the river along the bottom, and the fresh water continuing to flow outwards on the surface.
I now had the delightful opportunity of once more breathing my native air, viewing beautiful Mount Edgcumbe, revelling in clotted cream and potted pilchards, tickling my palate—as Quin used to do—with John-dories, conger eels, star-gazey and squab pies, cray-fish, and sometimes, but not very often—for my purse was only half-flood in consequence of my expenses whilst on shore at the “Tap” at Sheerness—I had a drive upon Dock.
These grunes are reefs, rising a little above low water, but, as the tide was about half-flood, they were a few feet below it; yet at times there was scarcely enough depth to float us over them, while the brown seaweed torn from their edges lay in our wake, something like the swaths of grass in a meadow after the scythe has swept through it.
Ruby saw this: it was plain for a child to read. She saw the curded tide, now at half-flood, boiling around the Raney; she saw the little craft swoop down on it, half buried in the seas through which she was being impelled; she saw distinctly one form, and one only, on the deck beside the helm a form that flung up its hands as it shot by the smooth edge of the reef, a hand's-breadth off destruction.
Blue figures ran busily about on her, and a white-and-blue person in a peaked cap stood importantly at the wheel. "She was on the mud last night," said Audrey eagerly, "opposite the Flank buoy, and she came up this morning at half-flood. I think they made fast at Lousey Hard, because they couldn't get any farther without waiting. They have a motor, and it must be their first trip this season.
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