In pursuance of his policy Tinker took Elsie forward, and left Dorothy and his father to entertain one another on the quarter-deck.

The two children amused themselves very well talking to Alphonse, the steersman, and Adolphe, the engineer, thick-set, thick-witted men, who combined the picturesqueness of organ-grinders with the stolidity of agriculturalists; Nature had plainly intended them for the plough, and Circumstance had pitched them into seafaring.
An hour's steering brought them across the Gulf.

They landed, and made their dejeuner at a little auberge, or rather cabaret, affected by fishermen, and the folk of the _Landes_, off grey mullet, fresh from the Bay of Biscay, grilled over a fire of pine-cones, with a second course of ring-doves roasted before it.
After their coffee Tinker suggested that they should cross over to the strip of sand which at that point separates the Gulf from the Bay, and the others fell in with his humour.

They crossed over and landed in the yacht's dinghy.

Tinker insisted on taking two rugs, though both Dorothy and his father objected that the sand was quite dry enough to sit on.