boat and set out on our voyage. It was then two o'clock
in the afternoon, the sun was shining, and the tide, which was at the
turn, was beginning to flow.

I had never been in a boat before, but I dared not say anything about
that, and after Martin had fixed the bow oar for me and taken the stroke
himself, I spluttered and plunged and made many blunders. I had never
been on the sea either, and almost as soon as we shot clear of the shore
and were lifted on to the big waves, I began to feel dizzy, and dropped
my oar, with the result that it slipped through the rollocks and was
washed away. Martin saw what had happened as we swung round to his
rowing, but when I expected him to scold me, he only said:

"Never mind, shipmate! I was just thinking we would do better with one,"
and, shipping his own oar in the stern of the boat, he began to scull.

My throat was hurting me, and partly from shame and partly from fear, I
now sat forward, with William Rufus on my lap, and said as little as
possible. But Martin was in high spirits, and while his stout little
body rolled to the rocking of the boat he whistled and sang and shouted
messages to me over his shoulder.

"My gracious! Isn't this what you call ripping?" he cried, and though my
teeth were chattering, I answered that it was.

"Some girls--Jimmy Christopher's sister and Nessy MacLeod and Betsy
Beauty--would be frightened to come asploring, wouldn't they?"

"Wouldn't they?" I said, and I laughed, though I was trembling down to
the soles of my shoes.

We must have been half an hour out, and the shore seemed so far away
that Murphy's Mouth and Tommy's cabin and even the trees of the Big
House looked like something I had seen through the wrong end of a
telescope, when he turned his head, with a wild light in his eyes, and
said:

"See the North Pole out yonder?"

"Don't I?" I answered, though I was such a practical little person, and
had not an ounce of "dream" in me.

I knew quite well where he was going to. He was going to St. Mary's
Rock, and of all the places on land or sea, it was the place I was most
afraid of, being so big and frowning, an ugly black mass, standing
twenty to thirty feet out of the water, draped like a coffin in a pall,
with long fronds of sea-weed, and covered, save at high water, by a
multitude of hungry sea-fowl.

A white cloud of the birds rose from their sleep as we approached, and
wheeled and whistled and screamed and beat their wings ov