Devon Boys | Page 3

go along sidewise, unless they want to get lower, and then they make a zigzag, so far one way and so far another, backwards and forwards, down the slope till they come to where it goes straight down to the sea with a raw edge at the top, and the cliff-face, which keeps crumbling away, in some places lavender and blue where it is slate, and in others all kinds of tints, as red and grey, where it's limestone or grit.
In the course of time the sheep leave a regular lot of tracks like tiny shelves up the side of the sloping cliffs, and the lowest of these gets taken by the people who are going along the coast, and is trampled down more and more, till it grows into a regular footpath, such as we were going along this hot midsummer day.
Part of our way lay close to the edge of the cliff, where it was about four hundred feet straight down, but a dense wood of oak-trees grew there, and their trunks formed a regular fence and screen between us and the edge, so that the pathway was quite safe, though it would not have troubled us much if it had not been, being used to the place; but in a short time we were through the wood, and out on the open cliff--from shade to sunshine.
I ought not to leave that wood, though, without saying something about it, for just there the trees grew very curiously. Of course you know what an oak-tree is, and how it grows up tall and rugged and strong, but our oak-trees didn't grow like that. You've seen horses out in a field on a stormy day, I suppose, when the wind blows, and the rain beats. If they have no trees, hedges, or wall to get under, they always turn their backs to the wind, and you can see their tails and manes streaming out and blown all over them.
Well there's no shelter out there on our coast, only in the caves, and the oak-trees there do just the same as the horses, for they seem to turn their backs to the wind; and their boughs look as if they are being blown close down to the side of the cliff slope and spread out ready to spring up again as soon as the wind has passed. But they don't, for they stop in that way growing close down and all on one side, and they very seldom get at all big.
That was a capital path as soon as we were out of the wood, running up and down the slope sometimes four, sometimes six or seven hundred feet above the sea, just as it happened, and with the steep cliff above us jagged with great masses of rock that looked as if they were always ready to fall rolling and crashing till they got to the broken edge, when they would leap right down into the sea. Sometimes they did, but only when a thaw came after a severe frost. There was none of that sort of thing though at midsummer, and the overhanging rocks did not trouble us as we scampered along in the bright elastic air, feeling as if we were so happy that we must do something mischievous.
The path was no use to us, it was too smooth and plain and safe, so we went down to the very edge of the precipice, and looked over at the beautiful clear sea, hundreds of feet below, and made plans to go prawning in the rock pools, crabbing when the tide was out, and to get Bigley's father to lend us the boat and trammel net, to set some calm night and catch all we could.
"Think he'll lend it to us, Bigley?" asked Bob.
"I don't know. I'm afraid he won't."
"Why not?" I said. "He did last holidays."
"Yes," said Bigley; "but your father hadn't got the Gap then, and made him cross, for he said he was going to buy it, only your father bought it over his head."
"But had he got the money?" I said.
"Oh, yes. He's got lots of money, though he never spends any hardly."
"He makes it all smuggling," said Bob. "He'll be hung some day, or shot by some of the king's sailors."
Bigley turned on him quickly, but he did not say a word; and just then a stone-chat's nest took his attention. After that we had to go round the end of a combe, as 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