But even if I hadn't had Allan John on my mind I shouldn't have gone walking on the beach. We have always indeed made it a point not to walk on the beach with our guests on the first rainy, restive morning of their arrival. In a geographical environment where every slushy step of sand, every crisp rug of pebbles, every wind-tortured cedar root, every salt-gnawed crag is as familiar to us as the palms of our own hands, it is almost beyond human nature not to try and steer one's visitors to the preferable places, while the whole point of this introductory expedition demands that the visitors shall steer themselves. In the inevitable mood of uneasiness and dismay that overwhelms most house party guests when first thrust into each other's unfamiliar faces, the initial gravitations that ensue are rather more than usually significant. To be perfectly explicit, for instance, people who start off five abreast on that first rainy walk never come home five abreast! In the immediate case at hand, nobody came home at all until long after Allan John and I had finished our luncheon, and in the manner of that coming, George Keets had gravitated to leadership with the Bride and Bridegroom. Very palpably with the Bridegroom's assistance he seemed to be coaxing and urging the Bride's frankly jaded footsteps, while young Kennilworth and the May Girl brought up the rear staggering and lurching excitedly under the weight of a large and somewhat mysteriously colored wooden box. The Bridegroom and George Keets and young Kennilworth and the May Girl were as neat as yellow paint. But the poor Bride was ruined. Tattered and torn, her diaphanous glory had turned to real mist before the onslaught of wind and rain. Her hat was swamped, her face streaked with inharmonious colors. She was drenched to the skin. Her Bridegroom was distracted with anxiety and astonishment. Everybody was very much excited! Lured by some will-o-the-wisp that lurks in waves and beaches they had lost their way it seems between one dune and another, staggered up sand-hills, fallen down sand-hills, sheltered themselves at last during the worst gust of all "in a sort of a cave in a sort of a cliff" and sustained life very comfortably "thank you" on some cakes of sweet chocolate which George Keets had discovered most opportunely in his big oil-skin pockets! But most exciting of all they had found a wreck! "Yes, a real wreck! A perfectly lovely--beautiful--and quite sufficiently gruesome real wreck!" the May Girl reported.