m where the waters were gathered as they came down from the
hills above, forming a vast reserve that never failed, but kept up the
rattle and clatter of looms from year to year, and formed a place where
the boys early learned to dive and swim, making their plunges from one
of the ferny shelves above. They were pretty high, some of these
shelves, and required a cool head and steady nerve to mount to them in
safety; but they had been improved in time. By a little coaxing, James
Drinkwater had been induced by the boys to climb with them on the one
side or the other of the gorge, armed with hammer and cold chisel, to
cut a step here, and knock out a stone there, so that most of the
shelves formed by the strata of limestone had been made accessible, and
glorious places to ascend to for those who loved to scramble.

One of these shelves--the best of all, so Will said--was quite three
hundred feet above the dam. It was filled with bristling, gnarled oak,
and the walls beneath were draped with Nature's curtains, formed of the
long strands of small-leaved ivy; and there, if you liked, you could
look down, to the left, upon a lovely garden, the mossy roofs of mill
and house, all to the left; while to the right you looked up the zig-zag
gorge with its closed-in, often perpendicular walls, to see the glancing
waters of the stream, and far up, the great plunging fall, flashing with
light when the sun was overhead, deep in shadow as it passed onward
towards the west.

Best of all, Will said, was lying on your breast looking right into the
dam, pitching down collected pebbles, which fell with a splashless
"chuck!" making "ducks' eggs," as they called it, and sending the white
Aylesburys scuttling out of the way.

So much for the home of Will of the Mill.

CHAPTER TWO.

FISHING FOR FUN.

It was up one of the shelves at the side of the great ravine that Will
silently hurried his comrade, the Vicar's son, to where they could look
down at the shelf below, a fairly open, verdant space, which offered
before it on the other side of the stream just such a rocky landscape
full of colour, light and shade, as artists love.

Will held up his hand to ensure silence, and then, taking hold of a
projecting oak bough, peered down and signed to Josh to come and look.
There was not much to see; there was an easel and a small canvas
thereon, an open black japanned paint-box, a large wooden palette
blotched with many colours lying on a bed