"Yes! I'd have tried to do it too, if he hadn't been so completely 'all in,'" laughed the scout. "I suppose we'll have plenty of opportunities to see seals and listen to their barking when we camp out on the white dunes during the last days of August and the beginning of September. They say the young ones make a kind of cooing noise, much like a turtle-dove, only stronger; I'm bent on capturing a pup-seal, to tame him!" "Oh! you'd have no trouble about the taming, only you couldn't feed him! But you'll see seals a-plenty an' hear 'em, too, next summer. They just love to lie out on a reef o' rocks in the sun, when the tide's low, especially if the wind's a little from the no'thwest," said the ex-skipper. "A lonely reef, a warm sun, and light no'thwesterly breeze make up the harbor-seal's heaven, I guess!" CHAPTER XV THE CAMP ON THE DUNES And when those fervently anticipated last days of August did in due time dawn, they brought with them many opportunities to Nixon and his brother scouts of watching Spotty Seal and his kindred in the enjoyment of their mundane paradise, whose pavement of gold was a wave-washed reef and its harpings the mild bluster of a northwesterly breeze. During the final week of August and the first of September their scoutmaster, a rising young naval architect, had a respite from designing wooden vessels, from considering how he could best combine speed and seaworthiness in an up-to-date model; and he arranged to devote the whole of that holiday to camping out with his boy scout troop upon the milky Sugarloaf Dunes. A more ideal camping-ground could scarcely have been found than among the white sand-hills, capped with plumy vegetation which formed the background for an equally dazzling line of beach, where the gray-and-white gulls strutted in feathered rendezvous, and were hardly to be scared away by the landing in their midst of the first patrol of scouts, put ashore from Captain Andy's motor-boat in a light skiff, a more capacious rowboat than the Pill. But they had brought the tubby Pill down the river too, in tow of the launch; and Captain Andy, who was partial to scouts, had arranged to leave that rotund little rowboat with them, so that, two or three at a time, they might explore the tidal river with the creeks that intersected the marshes in the neighborhood of the white dunes. "Just look at that gray gull, will you?" laughed Patrol Leader Nixon, as he landed from the skiff. "He's made up his mind that we Owls have no rights here: that this white beach is his stamping-ground, and he won't be frightened away!" Other gulls had reluctantly taken wing and wheeled off during the prolonged process of landing the eight members of the Owl Patrol, with their scoutmasters and camp outfit, in various detachments from the launch, which was too large to run right in to the beach.