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Updated: May 8, 2025
"Here is something in your Cornish style, Halbert." A thin wall of granite, like a vast buttress, ran into the sea, pierced by a great arch, some sixty feet high. Aloft all sharp grey stone: below, wherever the salt water had reached, a mass of dark clinging weed: while beyond, as though set in a dark frame, was a soft glimpse of blue sky and snow-white seabirds.
A little orphan cousin whom Mr Kennedy had adopted, used to row him over to this retirement, and while the boy stayed in their little boat, and fished, or hunted for seabirds' nests in the undisturbed creeks and inlets, Kennedy with some volume of the poets in his hand, would rest under the waving branches, and gaze upon the glancing waves.
The fall of such trees being a thing of common occurrence, and the natives accustomed to it, they never give it a second thought. The fishers in the canoes have not heeded it, while the sneezing of Caesar has been unheard by them amid the noises made by themselves, their dogs, and the shrieking seabirds still in full fracas overhead.
Jim pointed out a bronze tablet on a slanting ledge. "In memory of Ebenezer Hall, first English settler on Matinicus. He lived with his family in a log house at the head of this cove. In 1757 some Indians were camped on one of the Green Islands, six miles or so northwest, living on the eggs of seabirds. Hall went over to the island one day and set fire to the grass, destroying the nests and eggs.
Down there on the shore he stood alone, idly watching the white winged seabirds some floating in their own reflections on the calm pools of water left by the outgoing tide, others seeking food amid the green and crimson weeds that lay in bright patches on the rocks and often he turned his eyes in the direction of the setting sun, where, in the mid sea, Jarl Klerkon's dragonship moved slowly outward, with her wet oars glistening in the rosy light.
Happy days followed: blue and white days days vaulted and floored with blue, flashing with white granite, with the rush of white water beneath the shadow of the leaning sail, with white cirrus clouds, with white wings of seabirds.
His sunburnt face, his queer and personal strain of talk, recalled days that were scarce over and that seemed already distant. Through the music of the band outside, and the chink and clatter of the dining-room, it seemed to me as if I heard the foaming of the surf and the voices of the seabirds about Midway Island.
The sea calls to the blood of this woman, who has married into an inland home; and the sea-cry, which is the desire of more abundant life, of unlimited freedom, of an unknown ecstasy, takes form in a vague Stranger, who has talked to her of the seabirds in a voice like their own, and whose eyes seem to her to have the green changes of the sea.
And he covered his eyes. So the prayer was said to the accompaniment of the surf and seabirds, and all rose refreshed and felt lightened of a load. Up to then, they had cherished their guilty memories in private, or only referred to them in the heat of a moment and fallen immediately silent. Now they had faced their remorse in company, and the worst seemed over. Nor was it only that.
To the enormous lava rocks succeeded soon those capricious sand dunes, among which the engineer had been so singularly recovered, and which seabirds frequented in thousands.
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