Then on the greensward there was the smoothest turf, a band of it only—­not coarse grass with stalks far apart, as it is on most sea-beaches; but smooth and short as though it had been cropped by a thousand woolly generations.  “Such a place!” they both cried.  And Anna, who had never been here before, clapped her hands in delight.

“This is like heaven!” she sighed, as the prow of the boat grated refreshingly on the sand, and Simeon sprang over with a splash, standing to his mid-thigh in the salt water to pull the boat ashore.

Then Simeon and Anna ran races on the smooth turf.  They examined carefully the heaped mounds of shells, mostly broken, for the “legs of mutton” that meant to them love and long life and prosperity.  They chose out for luck also the smooth little rose-tinted valves, more exquisite than the fairest lady’s finger-nails.

Next they found the spring welling up from an over-flow mound which it had built for itself in the ages it had run untended.  Little throbbing grains of sand dimpled in it, and the mound was green to the top; so that Simeon and Anna could sit, one on one side and the other upon the other, and with a farle of cake eat and drink, passing from hand to hand alternate, talking all the time.

It was a divine meal.

“This is better than having to go to church!” said Anna.

Simeon stared at her.  This was not the Sabbath or a Fast-day.  What a day, then, to be speaking about church-going!  It was bad enough to have to face the matter when it came.

“I wonder what we should do if the Great Auk were suddenly to fly out of the rocks up there, and fall splash into the sea,” he said, to change the subject.

“The Great Auk does not fly,” said positive Anna, who had been reading up.

“What does it do, then?” 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.