He could cook all we wanted to eat and make molasses taffy that was
just like a dream. He kept our clothes all mended, and everything
about the lighthouse was neat as wax. Of course I helped him lots. I
like pottering round.

He used to hear our lessons and tell us splendid stories and saw that
we always said our prayers. Claude and I wouldn't have done anything
to make him feel bad for the world. Father is just lovely.

To be sure, he didn't seem to have any relations except us. This used
to puzzle Claude and me. Everybody on the mainland had relations; why
hadn't we? Was it because we lived on an island? We thought it would
be so jolly to have an uncle and aunt and some cousins. Once we asked
Father about it, but he looked so sorrowful all of a sudden that we
wished we hadn't. He said it was all his fault. I didn't see how that
could be, but I never said anything more about it to Father. Still, I
did wish we had some relations.

It is always lovely out here on the Big Half Moon in summer. When it
is fine the harbour is blue and calm, with little winds and ripples
purring over it, and the mainland shores look like long blue lands
where fairies dwell. Away out over the bar, where the big ships go, it
is always hazy and pearl-tinted, like the inside of the mussel shells.
Claude says he is going to sail out there when he grows up. I would
like to too, but Claude says I can't because I'm a girl. It is
dreadfully inconvenient to be a girl at times.

When it storms it is grand to see the great waves come crashing up
against the Big Half Moon as if they meant to swallow it right down.
You can't see the Little Half Moon at all then; it is hidden by the
mist and spume.

We had our pirate cave away up among the rocks, where we kept an old
pistol with the lock broken, a rusty cutlass, a pair of knee boots,
and Claude's jute beard and wig. Down on the shore, around one of the
horns of the Half Moon, was the Mermaid's Pool, where we sailed our
toy boats and watched for sea kelpies. We never saw any. Dick says
there is no such thing as a kelpy. But then Dick has no imagination.
It is no argument against a thing that you've never seen it. I have
never seen the pyramids, either, but I know that there are pyramids.

Every summer we had some hobby. The last summer before Dick and Mimi
came we were crazy about kites. A winter boy on the mainland showed
Claude how to make them, and when we went back to the Big Half Moon we
made ki