Such pure and beautiful sounds are
sometimes heard in human voices, chiefly in children, when
they are talking and laughing in joyous excitement. But for
any sort of conversation they were too volatile; before I
could get a dozen words from them they would be off again,
flying and flitting along the margin, like sandpipers, and
beating the clear-voiced sandpiper at his own aerial graceful
game.
By and by I was favoured with a fine exhibition of the spirit
animating these two little things. The weather had made it
possible for the crowd of visitors to go down and scatter
itself over the beach, when the usual black cloud sprang up
and soon burst on us in a furious tempest of wind and rain,
sending the people flying back to the shelter of a large
structure erected for such purposes against the cliff. It was
a vast barn-like place, open to the front, the roof supported
by wooden columns, and here in a few minutes some three or
four hundred persons were gathered, mostly women and their
girls, white and blue-eyed with long wet golden hair hanging
down their backs. Finding a vacant place on the bench, I sat
down next to a large motherly-looking woman with a robust or
dumpy blue-eyed girl about four or five years old on her lap.
Most of the people were standing about in groups waiting
for the storm to blow over, and presently I noticed my two
wild-haired dark little girls moving about in the crowd.
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