hawthorn, which
makes an arch over the path. I, for one, was glad when we got through
this with no worse mishap than a stumble from Tam which caused the
lantern door to fly open and the candle to go out. We did not stop to
relight it, but scrambled down the screes till we came to the long
slabs of reddish rock which abutted on the beach. We could not see the
track, so we gave up the business of scouts, and dropped quietly over
the big boulder and into the crinkle of cliff which we called our cave.

There was nobody there, so we relit the lantern and examined our
properties. Two or three fishing-rods for the burn, much damaged by
weather; some sea-lines on a dry shelf of rock; a couple of wooden
boxes; a pile of driftwood for fires, and a heap of quartz in which we
thought we had found veins of gold--such was the modest furnishing of
our den. To this I must add some broken clay pipes, with which we made
believe to imitate our elders, smoking a foul mixture of coltsfoot
leaves and brown paper. The band was in session, so following our
ritual we sent out a picket. Tam was deputed to go round the edge of
the cliff from which the shore was visible, and report if the coast was
clear.

He returned in three minutes, his eyes round with amazement in the
lantern light. 'There's a fire on the sands,' he repeated, 'and a man
beside it.'

Here was news indeed. Without a word we made for the open, Archie
first, and Tam, who had seized and shuttered his lantern, coming last.
We crawled to the edge of the cliff and peered round, and there sure
enough, on the hard bit of sand which the tide had left by the burn
mouth, was a twinkle of light and a dark figure.

The moon was rising, and besides there was that curious sheen from the
sea which you will often notice in spring. The glow was maybe a
hundred yards distant, a little spark of fire I could have put in my
cap, and, from its crackling and smoke, composed of dry seaweed and
half-green branches from the burnside thickets. A man's figure stood
near it, and as we looked it moved round and round the fire in circles
which first of all widened and then contracted.

The sight was so unexpected, so beyond the beat of our experience, that
we were all a little scared. What could this strange being want with a
fire at half-past eight of an April Sabbath night on the Dyve Burn
sands? We discussed the thing in whispers behind a boulder, but none
of us had any solution. 'Belike