Chapter 7 - Page 2

penny
pickwick, honestly shared in lengths with a blunt knife, bestrew
the glen with these apprentices. Again, you might join our fishing
parties, where we sat perched as thick as solan-geese, a covey of
little anglers, boy and girl, angling over each other's heads, to
the to the much entanglement of lines and loss of podleys and
consequent shrill recrimination - shrill as the geese themselves.
Indeed, had that been all, you might have done this often; but
though fishing be a fine pastime, the podley is scarce to be
regarded as a dainty for the table; and it was a point of honour
that a boy should eat all that he had taken. Or again, you might
climb the Law, where the whale's jawbone stood landmark in the
buzzing wind, and behold the face of many counties, and the smoke
and spires of many towns, and the sails of distant ships. You
might bathe, now in the flaws of fine weather, that we pathetically
call our summer, now in a gale of wind, with the sand scourging
your bare hide, your clothes thrashing abroad from underneath their
guardian stone, the froth of the great breakers casting you
headlong ere it had drowned your knees. Or you might explore the
tidal rocks, above all in the ebb of springs, when the very roots
of the hills were for the nonce discovered; following my leader
from one group to another, groping in slippery tangle for the wreck
of ships, wading in pools after the abominable creatures of the
sea, and ever with an eye cast backward on the march off the tide
and the menaced line of your retreat. And then you might go
Crusoeing, a word that covers all extempore eating in the open air:
digging perhaps a house under the margin of the links, kindling a
fire of the sea-ware, and cooking apples there - if they were truly
apples, for I sometimes suppose the merchant must have played us
off with some inferior and quite local fruit capable of resolving,
in the neighbourhood of fire, into mere sand and smoke and iodine;
or perhaps pushing to Tantallon, you might lunch on sandwiches and
visions in the grassy court, while the wind hummed in the crumbling
turrets; or clambering along the coast, eat geans (the worst, I
must suppose, in Christendom) from an adventurous gean tree that
had taken root under a cliff, where it was shaken with an ague of
east wind, and silvered after gales with salt, and grew so foreign
among its bleak surroundings that to eat of its produce was an
adventure in itself.

There are mingled some dismal memories with so many that were
joyous. Of the fisher-wife, for instance, who had cut her throat
at Canty Bay; and of how I ran with the other children to the top
of the Quadrant, and beheld a posse of silent people escorting a
cart, and on the cart, bound in a chair,