To-day we bathed at sunrise, brisk and cold and clear. The morning tide was so exceedingly low that I ran dry shod clear around the north side of the cove until the whole upper bay was visible. Olson had not known it could be done. Returning we put Olson's boat into the water and Rockwell and I embarked with my painting outfit. I landed on the point I had just visited afoot. Rockwell in jumping ashore with the painter timed it badly, slipped, and fell full length into the surf of the ground swell, the dory almost riding over him. I roared with laughter--to his great fury. He rowed about in the harbor for almost two hours returning to bring me home. In the afternoon we repeated our excursion--all but the water sports--going this time to the south side of the cove. Rockwell's a good little oarsman and above all to be trusted to do as he's told to--a vice in grown-ups, a virtue in children.
That to-day began in snow and cloud matters not,--it ended in a glory. Olson, Rockwell, and I sat that late afternoon far out on the bay basking in the warmth of a summer sun, rocked gently on a blue summer sea. For hours we had explored the island's western shore, skirting its tumbled reefs, riding through perilous straits right up to where the eddying water seethed at some jagged chasm's mouth. That's fine adventuring! flirting with danger, safe enough but close--so close to death. We landed on the beach of Sunny Cove, found in the dark thicket the moldering ruins of an old feed house of the foxes, gruesome with the staring bones of devoured carcasses. And then we younger ones dashed up the sheer, snow-covered eastward ridge--dashed on all fours digging our feet into the snow, clinging with hands as to a ladder. There at the top two or three hundred feet above the bay we overlooked the farthest seaward mountains of Cape Resurrection, then Barwell Island and the open sea.
Ah, to see again that far horizon! Wander where you will over all the world, from every valley seeing forever new hills calling you to climb them, from every mountain top farther peaks enticing you. Always the _distant_ land looks fairest, till you are made at last a restless wanderer never reaching home--_never_--until you stand one day on the last peak on the border of the interminable sea, stopped by the finality of that.