"What is jolly, my boy?" I asked.

"O, I don't know, papa! It's _so_ jolly!"

"Is it the sunshine?" thought I; "and the wind? God's world all over? The
God of gladness in the hearts of the lads? Is it that? No wonder, then,
that they cannot tell yet what it is!"

I withdrew into my room; and so far from seeking to put an end to the
noise--I knew Connie did not mind it--listened to it with a kind of
reverence, as the outcome of a gladness which the God of joy had kindled
in their hearts. Soon after, however, I heard certain dim growls of
expostulation from Harry, and having, from experience, ground for believing
that the elder was tyrannising over the younger, I stopped that and the
noise together, sending Charlie to find out where the tide would be between
one and two o'clock, and Harry to run to the top of the hill, and find out
the direction of the wind. Before I was dressed, Charlie was knocking at my
door with the news that it would he half-tide about one; and Harry speedily
followed with the discovery that the wind was north-east by south-west,
which of course determined that the sun would shine all day.

As the dinner-hour drew near, the servants went over, with Walter at their
head, to choose a rock convenient for a table, under the shelter of the
rocks on the sands across the bay. Thither, when Walter returned, we bore
our Connie, carrying her litter close by the edge of the retreating tide,
which sometimes broke in a ripple of music under her, wetting our feet with
innocuous rush. The child's delight was extreme, as she thus skimmed the
edge of the ocean, with the little ones gambolling about her, and her mamma
and Wynnie walking quietly on the landward side, for she wished to have no