Never the less the region in winter is harsh and unfavoured. The wind pipes down the chimneys and clamours on the crags and fairly howls in giant witch-fashion on the ocean. The people go about their duties with shoulders shrugged up, with purple noses and freezing toes. In the houses, they can scarcely hear one another speak on the windiest days, and conversation is impossible anywhere near the Point; this life fosters in them a solitariness of the soul. With motley garments, sometimes quilts and shawls, strapped and buckled around them, the few who pursue lobster-fishing as a vocation fuss around their pounds or, out on the bay, haul their pots and swear. Their oaths mingle with the gale and the dashing waters and even freeze in mid air to come to land later and form icicles. At least, this was Rachel's fancy, and when she saw the bits of ice at the window ledges, she reached forth an arm and plucking them, dissolved them in her soft warm mouth, as if she would dissolve at the same time her grandfather's probable wrath. This wrath, being so justified, however, had something righteous in it, which Rachel was not slow to admit. Certainly it was not right that a man's living should be so hard a thing to win, and what was there for it but to exorcise these demons of wind and tide with language harsh enough to fit the occasion? David Beckett, despite his gentleness, was a prodigious oath maker; indeed, some of his oaths were so picturesque as to have come into general circulation, a fact which afforded Rachel not a little satisfaction. To be able to invent such oaths, she felt instinctively, required an imagination of no uncertain order. In winter her cheeks grew ruddy from the wind, tears caused by the cold sometimes stood in her eyes and the skin on the backs of her hands cracked until the knuckles bled. But she was very hardy and healthy. She had a fondness for mingling the impressions of form and colour and scent which bespoke a very sensuous temperament. The old man's delight in her was boundless. Whenever she approached him a wonderful tenderness illuminated his face; his blue eyes sparkled and a set of wrinkles, entirely new, shot out from their corners like rockets. On her part the child returned his feeling with a depth of affection, startling and almost tragic in one so young. She seemed to give the old man something of the vigour of childhood, while into her passed a little of the seriousness of age. They were constant companions. Sometimes in order not to be separated from her, David took her out in the dory. There, while the boat rose and sank and rose again, and Zarah Patch's nephew phlegmatically set or hauled the pots, the old man sought to answer her numerous questions, suggested for the most part, by her chance study of the family Bible. "Does God raise up the lobsters?" she asked one day, "the lobsters we kill."