The Magnet; (Published Serially as the Pilot-Fish), a Romance (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: two hundred yards of the Daffodil, at which she looked curiously. Nobody was in sight, and the dinghy was hanging out astern. " Lazy beast! " thought Hermione, with the contempt of the earlj riser for the sloths who are still in bed. She fetched up at the beach, a good mile from the Shark, and leaped ashore, grapnel in one hand and her little double-barrelled gun in the other. The tide was well out, and on reaching a point whence she could look over into the little lagoon, with its encircling strip of marsh, Hermione could see several flocks of plover and big snipe weaving here and there, like motes of dust eddying in the breeze, while their clear whistlings reached her) sharp and sweet in the morning air. She passed quickly over the crest of the beach and hurried toward a point some quarter of a mile distant, where the pine-scrub grew down to skirt the sedge. As the tide was far out, Hermione judged that, in all probability, the sedge was full of feeding birds, so she loaded her gun and started in to beat out the rim of the marsh. Scarcely had she gone fifty feet when up sprang a big yellow-leg snipe, rising straight in the air as though propelled less by its wings than the spring from the long, powerful legs. He was notto be missed under the conditions. Hermione's gun flew to her shoulder, her quick eye glanced along the shining barrel, and making quite sure, she fired. The very centre of the charge found the unfortunate bird, and down it dropped, straight as a plummet. Another rose to the left. Hermione fired and missed. The two reports had aroused the marsh, however, and the air was filled with flying birds and their shrill, startled calls. A bunch of splendid golden plover, rising from the other side of the lagoon, began to circle the place, and Hermione, her brea...