limpid rivulets, each one of which ploughed a separate silver furrow across the glistening sand until all were merged in ocean, mighty father of streams and men.  Mark ran with the rivulets until he stood by the waves’ edge.  All was here of which he had read, shells and seaweed, rocks and cliffs and sand; he felt like Robinson Crusoe when he looked round him and saw nothing to break the solitude.  Every point of the compass invited exploration and promised adventure.  That white road running northward and rising with the cliffs, whither did it lead, what view was outspread where it dipped over the brow of the high table-land and disappeared into the naked sky beyond?  The billowy towans sweeping up from the beach appeared to him like an illimitable prairie on which buffaloes and bison might roam.  Whither led the sandy track, the summit of whose long diagonal was lost in the brightness of the morning sky?  And surely that huddled grey building against an isolated green cliff must be grandfather’s church of which his mother had often told him.  Mark walked round the stone walls that held up the little churchyard and, entering by a gate on the farther side, he looked at the headstones and admired the feathery tamarisks that waved over the tombs.  He was reading an inscription more legible than most on a headstone of highly polished granite, when he heard a voice behind him say: 

“You mind what you’re doing with that grave.  That’s my granfa’s grave, that is, and if you touch it, I’ll knock ’ee down.”

Mark looked round and beheld a boy of about his own age and size in a pair of worn corduroy knickerbockers and a guernsey, who was regarding him from fierce blue eyes under a shock of curly yellow hair.

“I’m not touching it,” Mark explained.  Then something warned him that he must assert himself, if he wished to hold his own with this boy, and he added: 

“But if I want to touch it, I will.”

“Will ’ee?  I say you won’t do no such a thing then.”

Mark seized the top of the headstone as firmly as his small hands would allow him and invited the boy to look what he was doing.

“Lev go,” the boy commanded.

“I won’t,” said Mark.

“I’ll make ’ee lev go.”

“All right, make me.”

The boy punched Mark’s shoulder, and Mark punched blindly back, hitting his antagonist such a little way above the belt as to lay himself under the imputation of a foul blow.  The boy responded by smacking Mark’s face with his open palm; a moment later they were locked in a close struggle, heaving and panting and pushing until both of them tripped on the low railing of a grave and rolled over into a carefully tended bed of primroses, whence they were suddenly jerked to their feet, separated, and held at arm’s length by an old man with a grey beard and a small round hole in the left temple.

“I’ll learn you to scat up my tombs,” said the old man shaking them violently. “’Tisn’t the first time I’ve spoken to you, Cass Dale, and who’s this?  Who’s this boy?”