" said Simeon. "No wonder it got killed!"

"It could only waddle and swim," replied Anna.

"Then I could shoot it easy! I always can when the things can't fly, or
will stand still enough.--It is not often they will," he added after due
consideration.

Many things in creation are exceedingly thoughtless.

Thereupon Simeon took to loading his gun ostentatiously, and Anna moved
away. Guns were uncertain things, especially in Simeon's hands, and Anna
preferred to examine some of the caves. But when she went to the opening
of the nearest, there was something so uncanny, so drippy, so clammy
about it, with the little pools of water dimpled with drops from above,
and the spume-balls rolled by the wind into the crevices, that she was
glad to turn again and fall to gathering the aromatic, hay-scented
fennel which nodded on the edges of the grassy slopes.

There was no possibility of getting up or down the cliffs that rose
three hundred feet above the Glistering Beaches, for the ledges were
hardly enough for the dense population of gannets which squabbled and
babbled and elbowed one another on the slippery shelves.

Now and then there would be a fight up there, and white eggs would roll
over the edge and splash yellow upon the turf. Wherever the rocks became
a little less precipitous, they were fairly lined with the birds and
hoary with their whitewash.

After Simeon had charged his gun, the children proceeded to explore the
caves, innocently taking each other's hands, and advancing by the light
of a candle--which, with flint and steel, they had found in the locker
of their boat.

First they had to cross a pool, not deep, but splashy and unpleasant.
Then more perilously they made their way along the edges of the water,
walking carefully upon the slippery stones, wet with the clammy,
contracted breath of the cave. Soon, however, the cavern opened out into
a wider and drier place, till they seemed to be fairly under the mass of
the island; for the cliffs, rising in three hundred feet of solid rock
above their heads, stretched away before them black and grim to the
earth's very centre.

Anna cried out, "Oh, I cannot breathe! Let us go back!"

But the undaunted Simeon, determined to establish his masculine
superiority once for all, denied her plumply.

"We shall go back none," he said, "till we have finished this candle."

So, clasping more tightly her knight-errant's hand, Anna sighed, and
resigned herself for once to