WHAT THE TIDE BROUGHT IN
Father and Sally, Andy and Alice, were spending a morning down on the
rocks.
The tide was out, and the jagged, uneven, rocky shore lay brown and dry
under the hot summer sun. Soon the tide would turn and roll in again,
dashing up higher and higher over the rocks until every one would be
forced to run farther inland to escape the wash of the waves and the
dashing spray.
But now the rocks were well out of water, and over them climbed Sally
and Alice and Andy, hunting for treasures that the sea had left behind
in little pools and hollows everywhere.
‘Here is seaweed,’ called Sally, holding up the long, wet, brown
strands. ‘It is what the mermaids wear in their hair, Andy, you know.’
‘I don’t think my mermaid wore any,’ answered Andy, who still liked
to tell the story of how his mermaid, as he called her, had saved his
boat, ‘but then her green cap was very tight and I couldn’t see her
hair. Oh, Sally, Sally, what is this?’
Andy was dancing about a little pool as he pointed to something on its
edge, as excited as if he saw another mermaid rising from its clear and
shallow depths.
‘It is a crab,’ said Sally, laughing at Andy’s puzzled face, ‘a baby
crab. See him run.’
And Andy and Sally laughed happily together as the little crab scuttled
hastily away out of sight.
‘These are periwinkles,’ explained Sally, as she came upon Alice
gingerly poking with a stick a number of small gray shells. ‘That shell
is a house, and the periwinkle lives inside. When he goes walking he
carries his house on his back.’
‘Sit very still for a moment,’ said Father, who had come up behind the
little group, ‘and perhaps you will see the periwinkles walking away.’
Sure enough, while Sally and Andy and Alice waited, scarcely winking
an eyelash nor drawing a long breath, the procession moved slowly off,
each periwinkle carrying his little gray house that did not look unlike
the gray houses of Seabury Town itself.
‘If they were walking in the sand, each one would leave a little track,
wouldn’t he, Father?’ said Sally, blowing upon the slowly moving houses
as if to make their tenants hurry along.
‘I shouldn’t like to live all alone in a house,’ said Andy. ‘I
shouldn’t like it at night.’
And Andy shook his head as he thought of his own little crib standing
close beside his mother’s big bed.
‘Poor little periwinkle,’ said tender-hearted Alice. ‘Do you think he
is ever lonely?’
‘No, indeed,’ answered Father. ‘See him walking off with his family
now. He will tell every one he meets what an exciting morning he has
had, how one little girl rapped on the roof of his house with a stick
and another one blew on him until it almost gave him a cold in his
head. Perhaps the periwinkles will give a party to-night and invite the
crabs to come and hear all about it.’
This made every one laugh, and Sally asked, ‘What will they eat at the
party?’
‘Jelly,’ answered Father promptly, ‘made by the jellyfish, of course.’
‘Oh, show us the jellyfish,’ cried Sally, jumping about on the rocks
until it seemed as if she must tumble down. ‘Show us the jellyfish,
Father.’
So Father led the way in the search for jellyfish, and when they were
found, lying in pools of water here and there, it was seen at once that
they had been well named.
‘They do look just like jelly,’ said Alice, ‘raspberry jelly, I think.’
‘But jelly doesn’t have “stingers,”’ objected Sally, keeping a
respectful distance from the jellyfish’s long, waving ‘arms,’ that
would ‘sting like a bee,’ she told her friends, if they went too near.
‘Here is a sea anemone,’ said Father, pointing to a rose-colored,
star-shaped form lying in a pool.
‘It looks like a flower,’ said Alice.
And so it did.
‘Touch it gently,’ said Father to Andy, who carried a little stick.
Very carefully Andy leaned over the pool, very gently he touched the
anemone, and in an instant what had looked like a full-blown, brilliant
flower now grew smaller and smaller, until it was not half its former
size.
‘I don’t want to touch it,’ said Alice, her hands behind her back, ‘but
I do want to fish. Miss Neppy said that if I brought a fish home she
would cook it for my dinner.’
Now Alice and Sally and Andy had come down to the rocks this morning
quite prepared to catch any number of fish.
Each one had a fishing rod made of a lilac switch out by Father from
the white-lilac bush that grew beside Sally’s kitchen door. And each
one had fastened to the rod a long piece of string, on the end of which
was tied a bent pin.
As they settled themselves in a row and prepared to fling their lines
into the sea, you might have noticed that behind each fisherman stood a
pail, a gay-colored tin pail used for digging in the sand, but equally
useful for carrying home a large catch of fish.
‘Did you ever catch anything?’ asked Andy of Sally, who had lived all
her life by the sea.
‘No, I haven’t yet,’ answered Sally truthfully, ‘but then I always
think I may.’
‘There are whales in the sea,’ volunteered Alice. ‘The Bible says so.
Oh, how I wish I could catch a whale and carry it home to surprise Miss
Neppy and Mother!’
‘Whales are too big to carry home,’ instructed Sally. ‘I have seen
pictures of them. Father, isn’t a whale too big for Alice to carry
home?’
But Father was now sitting back in the shade, reading his morning
paper, and the sound of Sally’s shrill little voice was carried away by
the breeze.
Near by the blue waves glittered and danced, while farther out at sea
sail-boats scudded before the wind, little motor boats chugged busily
past, and stately yachts moved slowly along, dazzling white in the
morning sun.
The fishermen fished on with never a bite, not even a nibble. They drew
in their lines, they bent their pins a-fresh, they tossed out their
lines again with many a whirl and twirl.
‘Do you think we will catch anything to-day?’ asked Andy, whose leg had
begun to have a ‘crick’ in it from sitting still so long.
But just then Alice uttered a cry and pointed out into the water.
‘Look! Look!’ cried Alice. ‘It is a fish, a fish out there in the
water. It is a whale, I know it is, a big blue whale.’
Sally and Andy followed Alice’s pointing finger. There on the surface
of the waves they could plainly see a number of objects, red and blue,
that seemed to be swimming toward them at a rapid rate.
‘They look like people’s heads,’ said Sally.
‘Perhaps they are mermaids,’ murmured Andy.
‘I think that first blue one is a whale,’ insisted Alice.
Now all the fishermen were so excited that they dropped their rods and
rose to their feet.
Sally waved her arms and called, ‘Father! Father!’
Andy and Alice could think of nothing better to do, so they, too, waved
their arms and shouted, ‘Father! Father!’ as loud as ever they could.
Father heard. He folded his paper, and came slowly over the rocks
toward the excited little group.
Yes, Father, too, saw the red and blue objects bounding along, dancing
lightly over the waves, and, with the children, wondered what they
were.
The tide had turned. Each wave came higher up on shore, and already an
eager bather or two had waded out into the rising water.
Soon a boy bather, gay in his red bathing-suit, saw the objects at
which three pairs of hands were pointing and waving wildly. He paddled
toward them, as they bobbed about, red and blue, and then with a laugh
that made the children laugh, too, he set them bounding faster than
ever over the waves toward the spot where Alice and Sally and Andy
stood.
‘What are they? Oh, what do you think they are?’ asked Alice over and
over again. ‘Do you think they can be whales?’
‘No, I don’t,’ replied Sally, wisely shaking her head. ‘They don’t look
like whales to me. Why, I know what they are. They are balls!’
‘Balls?’ echoed Andy in a shout. ‘Oh, I love balls!’
And balls they were, great red and blue rubber balls, and what they
were doing, sailing alone over the ocean, was a question hard for any
one to answer.
The merry little boy bather waded back and caught the balls as they
came bounding in to shore. He handed them up to the children, a red
ball each to Andy and Sally, a big red ball, hard and full of bounce,
you could see, while Alice wanted the blue ball so badly that she
couldn’t help holding out her hands for it, so of course the boy gave
the blue ball to her.
‘Where did they come from?’ asked Sally and Andy in a breath.
As for Alice, she didn’t ask any questions. She was rubbing her blue
ball dry on her dress, with an extra loving little pat every now and
then.
‘I am sure I can’t guess,’ was Father’s answer. ‘Perhaps I shall hear
something about it later on. Play with them at any rate and have a good
time.’
Now you cannot bounce a ball on sharp pointed rocks, and Sally and
Andy and Alice, each holding a ball in his arms, were making ready to
scramble back to the mainland to try their new treasures, when there
was a loud shout from the water that made every one turn round to see
what it could mean.
A small motor boat was chuf-chuf-chuffing straight toward the point
where they stood. And a man was standing in the bow of the boat waving
his hat in the air and shouting at the top of his voice,
‘My balls! My balls! They are my balls! My balls!’
As Sally and Andy and Alice each held a ball, and even the merry boy
bather had an extra ball in his hand that had just come bouncing gayly
in on the waves, it was plain that the man was talking to them.
So Father called back--he could do nothing else--‘If they are your
balls, come and get them.’
When Sally and Andy and Alice heard these words, they clutched their
balls very tightly as if they would never let them go.
But now Father was speaking again, for the man in the boat was quite
near.
‘How did your balls get in the water?’ called Father.
And the man shouted back, ‘The box they were in fell overboard and the
cover came off. I bought them for my shop over in Rockport, and I was
carrying them home when they fell overboard. I nearly lost a box of tin
horns, too.’
‘If you have a shop, perhaps you will sell these balls to me,’
suggested Father. ‘Would you like that ball you have?’ he asked the boy
bather.
But the boy bather shook his head.
‘No, I play baseball,’ said he.
And he tossed the ball he held back into the man’s boat.
‘I guess I can sell the balls to you,’ agreed the man, looking more
cheerful at once. ‘I am glad to make a sale anywhere.’
When Sally and Alice and Andy heard this, they prepared at once to go
home.
‘Let us put our balls into our pails,’ said Sally, ‘and bounce them
when we get home.’
So each ball was popped into a pail. They fitted nicely except that
they rose high over the top, round and plump and gay.
‘My pail is so full I am glad I left my shovel at home to-day,’ said
Sally, admiring the effect of her new red ball in her bright green pail.
‘Perhaps people will think we are carrying home fish,’ suggested Andy,
swinging his pail so hard it was well that his ball was a tight fit.
‘Perhaps they will think it is a whale,’ said Alice hopefully. ‘I would
love to surprise Miss Neppy and my mother with a whale.’
‘Perhaps they will,’ said Sally kindly. ‘Anyway, it is the first time
I ever caught anything when I went fishing, and I am glad it is a ball
and not a fish, aren’t you?’