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 waterfa