Devon Boys | Page 4

they call the valleys our way, and there we stopped
by the waterfall which came splashing down forming pool after pool in
the sunny rocks.
It was not to be expected that three boys fresh from school could pass
that falling stream without leaping from rock to rock, and penetrating a
hundred yards inland, to see if we could find a dipper's nest, for one of
the little cock-tailed blackbirds gave us a glimpse of his white collar as
he dropped upon a stone, and then walked into a pool, in whose clear
depths we could see him scudding about after the insects at the bottom,
and seeming to fly through the water as he beat his little rounded wings
using them as a fish does fins.
The nest was too cleverly hidden for us to find, so, tiring of the little
stream, and knowing that there was one waiting for us in the Gap where
we could capture trout, we went on along the cliff path, gossiping as
boys will, till we reached the great buttress of rock that formed one side
of the entrance to the little ravine, and there perched ourselves upon the
great fragments of rock to look down at where the little stream came
rushing and sparkling from the inland hills till it nearly reached the sea
at the mouth of the Gap, and then came to a sudden end.
It looked curious, but it was a familiar object to us, who thought
nothing of the way in which the sea had rolled up a bank of boulders
and large pebbles right across the little river, forming a broad path
when the tide was down, and as the little river reached it the bright
clear stream ended, for its waters sank down through the pebbles and
passed invisibly for the next thirty or forty yards beneath the beach and
into the sea.
But when the tide was up this pebble ridge formed a bar, over which
there was just room for Uggleston's lugger to pass at high-water; and
there it was now in the little river, kept from turning down on its side
by a couple of props, while the water rippled about its keel.

From where we were perched it looked no bigger than a row-boat, and
the house that formed our school-fellow's home--a long, low,
stone-built place thatched with reeds--seemed as if it had been built for
dolls, while the fisherman's cottage on the other side, where an old
sailor friend lived, was apparently about as big as a box.
The scene was beautiful, but to us boys its beauty lay in what it offered
us in the way of amusement.
We were not long in deciding upon a ride down one of the clatter
streams--a ride that, though it is very bad for the breeches and worse
for the boots, while it sometimes interferes with the skin of the
knuckles, and may result in injury to the nose, is thoroughly enjoyable
and full of excitement while it lasts.
You don't know what a clatter stream is? Then I'll tell you.
Every here and there, where the slate cliffs run down in steep slopes to
the valleys, you can see from the very top to the bottom, that is to say
on a slope of some nine hundred feet, what look like little streams that
are perhaps a foot wide at the top and ten or a dozen at the bottom
where they open out. These are not streams of water, though in wet
weather the water does trickle down through them, and makes them its
bed, but streams of flat, rounded-edge pieces of slate and shale that
have been split off the face of the rock and fallen, to go slowly gliding
down one over the other, perhaps taking years in their journey. Some of
the pieces are as small as the scraps put in the bottom of a flower-pot,
others are as large as house slates and tiles, perhaps larger; but as they
go grinding over one another they are tolerably smooth, and form a
capital arrangement for a slide.
This thing determined upon we each selected a good broad piece big
enough to sit or kneel on, and then began the laborious ascent, which, I
may at once tell you, is the drawback to the enjoyment, for, though the
coming down is delightful, the drag up the steep precipitous slope, with
feet frequently slipping, is so toilsome a task that two or three slides
down used to be always considered what Dr Stacey at Barnstaple
School called quantum sufficit.

As a matter of course we were soon tired, but we managed three,
starting from right up at the top, and close after one another, with the
stones beneath us rattling, and sometimes