A sunlit sheet of sea, violet and azure, clothed in slender cloud shadows and heaving gently to the long Atlantic ground-swell. Up through the calm water, to meet the eye of the gazer, came the green clearness of stone, and blinks of unveined sand showing white between the brown tangled blades of the great oar-weed; and you might see a school of little cuddies, heads all one way, playing hide and seek in the sea forest, and caring no whit for the clumsy armored crab beneath them, who crawled sideways, a laborious patch of color in the shimmering transparency. Up out of the deep water the gray rocks rose clear and fine, a mass of platforms and pinnacles, roughened with barnacles and tufted with dulse, whose crimson leaves floated and swung in the white foam of the lisping swell; and above the rocks and beyond the sea's reach the cliff stood up black, showing all the strata that had gone to the making of it outlined with little patches of coarse grass. On one such patch grazed without concern a sheep which had slipped over, happy in her ignorance of the fact that she could never be drawn up again alive; the wiser raven overhead was clanging away with short barks to tell his mate. On a ridge on the cliff side sat a pair of young scarfs, almost invisible save when they twisted their long necks about like two snakes, trying to make up their minds to follow their mother, who had just flopped clumsily into the water, feet first, and had turned there and then into a miracle of easy grace, as she used her head to dash the spray over her back. Out at sea a solan rose steadily in a sweeping spiral, the white and black of him glittering in the sun; suddenly he checked, reversed engines, and fell plump like an inverted cross, his long raking wings clapping to as he struck the water; a moment, and he was up, and there sat, choking and gobbling over his fish, ere he rose again in his majestic rings. The two children had grounded their boat on a little pebble beach between the rocks, and were sitting on a big tuft of sea pinks, munching handfuls of the sweet dulse and watching the solan at his fishing. They were by way of fishing themselves, but the afternoon was as yet too early and too clear for them. The Urchin had a pile of stones beside him, and was apparently trying to see how many times in twenty he could miss a large and obvious spur of rock. Fiona had a book of poetry, and was making intermittent efforts to read; but the world was too full of things to give poetry a fair chance. The Urchin threw his last stone away. "Silly sitting here," he said; "come and explore."