"_Now_ you've done it!" cried Charlie. "Well, we're off, at any rate, so we may as well enjoy ourselves.--Hilda, you must steer while I row. If you watch me feather my oars, you'll see I can manage the thing in ripping style." There was such a strong ebb tide that Charlie had really no need to row. The boat went skimming over the waves as if she had been a veritable stormy petrel, sending the water churning round her bows. Although all four children felt a trifle guilty, they could not help enjoying the delightful sensation of that swift-rushing motion over the sea. Nearly all Anglo-Saxons have a love for the water: perhaps some spirit of the old vikings still lingers in our blood, and thrills afresh at the splash of the waves, the dash of the salt spray, and the fleck of the foam on our faces. There is a feeling of freedom, a sense of air, and space, and dancing light, and soft, subdued sound that blend into one exhilarating joy, when, with only a plank between us and the racing water, it is as if nature took us in her arms and were about to carry us away from every trammel of civilization, somewhere into that far-off land that lies always just over the horizon--that lost Atlantis which the old navigators sought so carefully, but never found. Isobel sat in the bows, her hand locked in Belle's. She felt as if they were birds flying through space together, or mermaids who had risen up from the sea-king's palace to take a look at the sun-world above, and were floating along as much a part of the waves as the great trails of bladder-wrack, or the lumps of soft spongy foam that whirled by them. Charlie rested on his sculls and let the boat take her course for a while; she was heading towards the bar, straight out from the cliffs and the harbour to where the heavy breakers, which dashed against the lighthouse, merged into the rollers of the open sea. "Aren't we going out rather a long way?" said Belle at last. "We've passed the old schooner and the dredger, and we're very nearly at the buoy. We don't want to sail quite to America, though it's jolly when we skim along like this. If we don't mind we shall be over the bar in a few minutes." "By jove! so we shall!" cried Charlie. "I didn't notice we'd come so far. We must bring her round.--Get her athwart, Hilda, quick!" "I suppose if you pull one line it goes one way, and if you pull the other line it goes the other way," said Hilda, whose first experience it was with the tiller, giving such a mighty jerk as an experiment that she swung the boat half round. "Easy abaft!" shouted Charlie. "Do you want to capsize us? Turn her to starboard; she's on the port tack. Put up the helm, and make her luff!" "What _do_ you mean?" cried Hilda, utterly bewildered by these nautical directions.