Devon Boys | Page 2

grand hunt over the new place.
The next day came, and with it Bob Chowne from Ripplemouth and Bigley Uggleston from the Gap; and we three boys set off over the cliff path for a regular good roam, with the sun beating down on our backs, the grasshoppers fizzling in amongst the grass and ferns, the gulls squealing below us as they flew from rock to rock, and, far overhead now, a hawk wheeling over the brink of the cliff, or a sea-eagle rising from one of the topmost crags to seek another where there were no boys.
Now I've got so much to tell you of my old life out there on the wild North Devon coast, that I hardly know where to begin; but I think I ought, before I go any farther, just to tell you a little more about who I was, and add a little about my two school-fellows, who, being very near neighbours, were also my companions when I was at home.
Bob Chowne was the son of an old friend of my father--"captain" Duncan, as people called him, and lived at Ripplemouth, three or four miles away. The people always called him Chowne, which they had shortened from Champernowne, and we boys at school often substituted Chow for Bob, because we said he was such a disagreeable chap.
I do not see the logic of the change even now, but the nickname was given and it stuck. I must own, though, that he was anything but an amiable fellow, and I used to wonder whether it was because his father, the doctor, gave him too much physic; but it couldn't have been that, for Bob always used to say that if he was ill his father would send him out without any breakfast to swallow the sea air upon the cliffs, and that always made him well.
Bigley Uggleston, my other companion, on the contrary, was about the best-tempered fellow that ever lived. He was the son of old Jonas Uggleston, who lived at the big cottage down in the Gap, on one side of the little stream. Jonas was supposed to be a fisherman, and he certainly used to fish, but he carried on other business as well with his lugger--business which enabled him to send his son to the grammar-school, where he was one of the best-dressed of the boys, and had about as much pocket-money as Bob and I put together, but we always spent it for him and he never seemed to mind.
I have said that he was an amiable fellow, and he had this peculiarity, that if you looked at him you always began to laugh, and then his broad face broke up into a smile, as if he was pleased because you laughed at him, and tease, worry, or do what you liked, he never seemed to mind.
I never saw another boy like him, and I used to wonder why Bob Chowne and I should be a couple of ordinary robust boys of fourteen, while he was five feet ten, broad-shouldered, with a good deal of dark downy whisker and moustache, and looked quite a man.
Sometimes Bob and I used to discuss the matter in private, and came to the conclusion that as Bigley was six months older than we were, we should be like him in stature when another six months had passed; but we very soon had to give up that idea, and so it remained that our school-fellow had the aspect of a grown man, but what Bob called his works were just upon a level with our own, for, except in appearance, he was not manly in the slightest degree.
CHAPTER TWO.
OUR CLIFFS.
I believe the sheep began all the creepy paths in our part of the country--not sheep such as you generally see about farms, or down to market, but our little handsome sheep with curly horns that feed along the sides of the cliffs in all sorts of dangerous places where a false step would send them headlong six or seven hundred feet, perhaps a thousand, down to the sea. For we have cliff slopes in places as high as that, where the edge of the moor seems to have been chopped right off, and if you are up there you can gaze down at the waves foaming over the rocks, and if you looked right out over the sea, there away to the north was Taffyland, as we boys called it, with the long rugged Welsh coast stretching right and left, sometimes dim and hazy, and sometimes standing out blue and clear with the mountains rising up in the distance fold behind fold.
I say I think the sheep used to make the cliff paths to begin with, for they don't feed up or feed down, but always