The spring nights were cold, and so at twilight they made themselves a
shelter of boughs. They slept as soon as it was night and woke and were
off at the break of dawn. Helma carried sweet chocolate in her pockets,
and forest friends and strangers offered them from their store all along
the way. Sometimes when they were tired or warm with walking they would
climb into the top of some tall tree, and there swinging among the cool
new leaves, Helma began telling them her World Stories again, while the
children looked off over the trembling forest roof and watched for
homing birds.

But when the hemlock and fir trees began to crowd out the maples and
oaks, Helma said quietly one day, "We are nearing the sea." "The sea,"
cried Eric almost wild with sudden delight. "Shall we see it? Shall we
swim in it? Oh, I have never seen it!"

"Oh, I saw it from Spring's shoulder," Ivra cried--she really thought
she had--"But mother, mother, what a wonderful surprise you had for us!"

They began to run in their eagerness. But Helma held them back. "It's a
day's journey yet," she said. And so they walked as patiently as they
could down a long, long slope through dark firs and hemlocks.

It was noon of the following day when they finally came to the sea. They
had struggled through a thick undergrowth of thorned bushes where the
great arms of the firs shut out everything ahead. Then suddenly they
were out of it, in the open, on the shore with the waves almost lapping
their toes. It was high tide. The blue sea stretched away to the blue
sky.

Eric's legs gave way under him, and he knelt on the white sand, just