Children of the lighthouse

“Will-ery you-ery come-ery with-ery me-ery and-ery play-ery?” shouted Ronald from the little patch of green in front of the Lighthouse.

“Yes-ery, I-ery will-ery!” answered Lesley, jumping up from the sand and tucking her book in a cleft of the rocks. Scrambling up the cliff like a sturdy little mountain goat, she reached Ronald laughing and rosy and panting out breathlessly, “What-ery shall-ery we-ery play-ery?”

“I hadn’t thought,” said Ronald, descending from their “secret language” to plain English. “Maybe we’ll get Jenny Lind and bring up some kelp to put on our gardens.”

“I don’t call that play,” objected Lesley; “that’s good hard work!”

“Oh, nothing isn’t work,” said Ronald, sensibly, if ungrammatically, “if you do it for play.”

“You are the funniest boy, Ronnie, I ever knew in all my life!” exclaimed Lesley.

“Sure I am!” laughed Ronald. “I must be, for I’m the only boy you ever did know!”--and here they both broke into a hearty peal of merriment that brought their mother, smiling, to the window.

It was true enough. Lesley and Ronald, eleven and eight years old, were the only children on the island and the only ones who had ever been there, but they were not by any means the only young things. There was a score of light-footed, dancing kids, there was a comfortable number of chickens, a rushing, scampering horde of rabbits, “Jim,” the pet crow, and uncounted half-grown sea-birds in the shelters of the cliffs.

As for grown-ups, there were the children’s father and mother, Malcolm and Margaret McLean, and the old Mexican sailor, Pancho Lopez, commonly known as “Stumpy.” Then there was the donkey, Jenny Lind, so called for the power and melody of her voice, and of course the parents of all the kids, chickens, rabbits, and sea-birds. In the pools of the rocks and on the beach there were jellyfish, great and small, starfish, crabs and sea-anemones, but these, although they added to the population of the island, could not be said to increase its gayety.

Gayety, though, as everybody knows, never comes from outside; it is just something that bubbles up from within, and Lesley and Ronald McLean each had a boiling spring of it in their own hearts.

The springs had not ceased to bubble after what the children considered Ronald’s first-class joke, when the sound of clattering hoofs and the roll of wheels announced the approach of that Jenny Lind whom they had intended to use as a playmate.

“Run, Ronnie, quick!” cried Lesley, “and see if father’s going down to the beach. Maybe we can go with him.”

“Hi! Father! Father!” called Ronald. “Wait for us!” running at top speed toward the cliff.

The donkey was pulled in at once, turning her head toward the children intelligently as they scrambled down the rocks to the car and starting on her way the moment she felt their weight and knew they were on board.

The children’s island, one of those in San Francisco Bay, is not a large one--perhaps three miles around--but it looks as if it were three times three miles deep in rocks. There are tall gray peaks shining like spear-heads above the water--peaks where the sea-birds build; great stretches of gray stone like castle walls, with towers and battlements; scattered fragments of granite heaped up like crumbs from a giants’ banquet, and ten trillion, two hundred and forty-one billion, five hundred and ninety-seven million, six hundred and nineteen thousand, four hundred and three stones and pebbles of various sizes along the shore.

Oh, no, there is no beach; just a rocky island with rocky edges and old Ocean singing and sighing and laughing and crying all around and about. No two-legged, or four-legged, or ever-so-many-legged creature could draw loads from the shore to the Lighthouse over such a roadway, even if it had been on level ground, and so Malcolm McLean, with the help of old “Stumpy” and a man brought from the mainland for a week, had laid down rails the entire distance and prevailed upon the Government to send him a little car which Jenny Lind pulled with ease over her private track.

“Going down to the storehouse for oil,” called Father, looking around at the youngsters from his perch in front. “You can stay down there with Stumpy for a while, if you like, or go back with me.”

“Oh, Stumpy, Stumpy!” cried Ronnie. “Maybe he’ll tell us a story.”

“Maybe he will,” said Father, dryly, nodding his head; “he’d rather tell stories than work any day.”

“Perhaps,” said Ronald, thoughtfully, “it might be just the same as work if you had to make up the stories.”

“But he doesn’t have to,” came quickly from Lesley; “they all happened to him.”

“No, not all,” eagerly, from Ronald; “not ‘The White Slipper’--I’m going to ask him for that to-day.”

“No, not ‘The White Slipper,’” agreed Lesley. “But I wish he’d tell us po’try, like what mother reads sometimes. I made up some myself last night about Jenny Lind.”

“About Jenny Lind? You couldn’t make po’try about a donkey!”

“You just listen now and see if I couldn’t,” cried Lesley.

“To shaggy Jenny Lind There came an awful wind And blew her over the cliff--

Over the cliff ... over the cliff--” slowly--“What was the last line?”

“Which made her puff and piff,” laughed Ronald.

“No such word as ‘piff,’” objected Lesley.

“It’s just as good as ‘puff,’” answered the youthful rhymester. “Isn’t it, Father?”

Father merely gave an absent-minded murmur, which might have meant either that it was, or that it wasn’t, and touched Jenny Lind lightly with the loop of the reins.

Up flew Jenny’s hind legs, bounce went the children, flat on the floor of the car, and all question of po’try was dropped as they drew up to the storehouse.