"Some girls--Jimmy Christopher's sister and Nessy MacLeod and Betsy
Beauty--would be frightened to come asploring, wouldn't they?"

"Wouldn't they?" I said, and I laughed, though I was trembling down to
the soles of my shoes.

We must have been half an hour out, and the shore seemed so far away
that Murphy's Mouth and Tommy's cabin and even the trees of the Big
House looked like something I had seen through the wrong end of a
telescope, when he turned his head, with a wild light in his eyes, and
said:

"See the North Pole out yonder?"

"Don't I?" I answered, though I was such a practical little person, and
had not an ounce of "dream" in me.

I knew quite well where he was going to. He was going to St. Mary's
Rock, and of all the places on land or sea, it was the place I was most
afraid of, being so big and frowning, an ugly black mass, standing
twenty to thirty feet out of the water, draped like a coffin in a pall,
with long fronds of sea-weed, and covered, save at high water, by a
multitude of hungry sea-fowl.

A white cloud of the birds rose from their sleep as we approached, and
wheeled and whistled and screamed and beat their wings over our heads. I
wanted to scream too, but Martin said:

"My gracious, isn't this splendiferous?"