hazard, tireless and eager little opportunists,
eternal prisoners of hope, tripped flat by creepers, scratched and
soiled in thicket and bog, but always up and forward again, ranging out,
nose in the wind, dauntless, expectant, wonder-eyed.

Nina, Eileen, and Selwyn formed a lagging and leisurely rear-guard,
though always within signalling distance of Boots and the main body;
and, when necessary, the two ex-army men wig-wagged to each other across
the uplands to the endless excitement and gratification of the
children.

It was a perfect week-end; the sky, pale as a robin's egg at morn and
even, deepened to royal blue under the noon-day sun; and all the
world--Long Island--seemed but a gigantic gold-green boat stemming the
running purple of the sea and Sound.

The air, when still, quivered in that deep, rich silence instinct with
the perpetual monotone of the sea; stiller for the accentless call of
some lone moorland bird, or the gauzy clatter of a dragon-fly in reedy
reaches. But when the moon rose and the breeze awakened, and the sedges
stirred, and the cat's-paws raced across the moonlit ponds, and the far
surf off Wonder Head intoned the hymn of the four winds, the trinity,
earth and sky and water, became one thunderous symphony--a harmony of
sound and colour silvered to a monochrome by the moon.

Then, through the tinted mystery the wild ducks, low flying, drove like
a flight of witches through the dusk; and unseen herons called from
their heronry, fainter, fainter till their goblin yelps died out in the
swelling murmur of a million wind-whipped leaves.

Then was the moorland waste bewitching in its alternation of softly
checkered gray and shade, where acres of feathery grasses flowed in
wind-blown furrows; where in the purple obscurity of hollows the strange
and aged little forests grew restless and full of echoes; where shadowy
reeds like elfin swords clattered and thrust and parried across the
darkling pools of haunted waters unstirred save for the swirl of a
startled fish or the smoothly spreading wake of some furry creature
swimming without a sound.

Into this magic borderland, dimmer for moonlit glimpses in ghostly
contrast to the shadow shape of wood and glade, Eileen conducted Selwyn;
and they heard the whirr of painted wood-ducks passing in obscurity,
and the hymn of the four winds off Wonder Head; and they heard the
herons, noisy in their heronry, and a young fox yapping on a moon-struck
dune.

Bu