A Labrador Doctor | Page 3

of the "Big
House," I was taken to see the poor lad, who had been brought home at

last, frozen to death.
The men of the opposite shores were shopkeepers and miners.
Somehow we knew that they couldn't help it. The nursery rhyme about
"Taffy was a Welshman; Taffy was a thief," because familiar, had not
led us to hold any unduly inflated estimate of the Welsh character. One
of my old nurses did much to redeem it, however. She had undertaken
the burden of my brother and myself during a long vacation, and
carried us off bodily to her home in Wales. Her clean little cottage
stood by the side of a road leading to the village school of the State
Mining District of Festiniog. We soon learned that the local boys
resented the intrusion of the two English lads, and they so frequently
chased us off the village green, which was the only playground offered
us, that we at last decided to give battle. We had stored up a pile of
slates behind our garden wall, and luring the enemy to the gates by the
simple method of retiring before their advance, we saluted them with
artillery fire from a comparatively safe entrenchment. To my horror,
one of the first missiles struck a medium-sized boy right over the eye,
and I saw the blood flow instantly. The awful comparison of David and
Goliath flashed across my terror-stricken mind, and I fled incontinently
to my nurse's protection. Subsequently by her adroit diplomacy, we
were not only delivered from justice, but gained the freedom of the
green as well.
Far away up the river came the great salt-water marshes which seemed
so endless to our tiny selves. There was also the Great Cop, an
embankment miles long, intended to reach "from England to Wales,"
but which was never finished because the quicksand swallowed up all
that the workmen could pour into it. Many a time I have stood on the
broken end, where the discouraged labourers had left their very shovels
and picks and trucks and had apparently fled in dismay, as if convicted
of the impiousness of trying to fill the Bottomless Pit. To my childish
imagination the upturned wheelbarrows and wasted trucks and rails
always suggested the banks of the Red Sea after the awful disaster had
swept over Pharoah and his host. How the returning tide used to sweep
through that to us fathomless gulch! It made the old river seem ever so
much more wonderful, and ever so much more filled with adventure.

Many a time, just to dare it, I would dive into the very cauldron, and let
the swirling current carry me to the grassy sward beyond--along which
I would run till the narrowing channel permitted my crossing to the
Great Cop again. I would be drying myself in the sunshine as I went,
and all ready for my scanty garments when I reached my clothing once
more.
Then came the great days when the heavy nor'westers howled over the
Sands--our sea-front was exposed to all the power of the sea right away
to the Point of Ayr--the days when they came in with big spring tides,
when we saw the fishermen doubling their anchors, and carefully
overhauling the holding gear of their boats, before the flooding tide
drove them ashore, powerless to do more than watch them battling at
their moorings like living things--the possessions upon which their very
bread depended. And then this one would sink, and another would part
her cable and come hurtling before the gale, until she crashed right into
the great upright blocks of sandstone which, riveted with iron bands to
their copings, were relied upon to hold the main road from destruction.
Sometimes in fragments, and sometimes almost entire, the craft would
be slung clean over the torturing battlements, and be left stranded high
and dry on our one village street, a menace to traffic, but a huge joy to
us children.
The fascination of the Sands was greatly enhanced by the numerous
birds which at all times frequented them, in search of the abundant food
which lay buried along the edges of the muddy gutters. There were
thousands of sandpipers in enormous flocks, mixed with king plovers,
dunlins, and turnstones, which followed the ebb tides, and returned
again in whirling clouds before the oncoming floods. Black-and-white
oyster-catchers were always to be found chattering over the great
mussel patches at low water. With their reddish bills, what a trophy a
bunch of them made as we bore them proudly home over our shoulders!
Then there were the big long-billed curlews. What a triumph when one
outwitted them! One of my clearest recollections is discovering a place
to which they were flighting at night by the water's edge; how, having