“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 over our heads.  I wanted to scream too, but Martin said: 

“My gracious, isn’t this splendiferous?”

“Isn’t it?” I answered, and, little hypocrite that I was, I began to sing.

I remember that I sang one of Tommy’s sailor-songs, “Sally,” because its jolly doggerel was set to such a jaunty tune—­

“Oh Sally’s the gel for me,
Our Sally’s the gel for me,
I’ll marry the gel that I love best
When I come back from sea.”

My pretence of happiness was shortlived, for at the next moment I made another mistake.  Drawing up his boat to a ledge of the rock, and laying hold of our painter, Martin leapt ashore, and then held out his hand to me to follow him, but in fear of a big wave I held back when I ought to have jumped, and he was drenched from head to foot.  I was ashamed, and thought he would have scolded me, but he only shook himself and said: 

“That’s nothing!  We don’t mind a bit of wet when we’re out asploring.”

My throat was hurting me again and I could not speak, but without waiting for me to answer he coiled the rope about my right arm, and told me to stay where I was, and hold fast to the boat, while he climbed the rock and took possession of it in the name of the king.

“Do or die we allus does that when we’re out asploring,” he said, and with his sack over his shoulder, his broom-handle in his hand and his little Union Jack sticking out of the hole in the crown of his hat, he clambered up the crag and disappeared over the top of it.

Being left alone, for the dog had followed him, my nervousness increased tenfold, and thinking at last that the rising tide was about to submerge the ledge on which I stood, I tried in my fright to climb the cliff.  But hardly had I taken three steps when my foot slipped and I clutched the seaweed to save myself from falling, with the result that the boat’s rope slid from my arm, and went rip-rip-ripping down the rock until it fell with a splash into the sea.