CHAPTER 13Miss Silver came up from the beach where she had left her niece Ethel Burkett sitting comfortably in the lee of a breakwater with little Josephine digging in the sand beside her. Farne has a very good beach though not a large one. Later on in the year there would not be room to move, but on this May morning Miss Silver considered it very pleasant—very pleasant indeed. She had enjoyed the delightful air and Josephine’s infant prattle. She had recalled with pleasure Lord Tennyson’s poem about the “fisherman’s boy” who “shouts with his sister at play,” and the “sailor lad” who “sings in his boat on the bay,” together with the much less well-known lines about the eagle:
“Ring’d with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls.”
Not that Farne Bay could at the m
