en Alec had
laid out his plans to me, I found them so consistent that I readily
agreed to help in the work.

Without wearying the reader by describing in too great detail the
building of our breakwater, I will just give an outline of how it was
built, and another great success achieved, although to ensure that
success we had to work like a couple of galley slaves. Still, with all
our hard work, we were as happy as a couple of schoolboys. We toiled,
sang, and ate with such appetites as only those who are used to hard
work in the sea air can know.

Our plan was to work on Monday; enjoy fishing, etc., on Tuesday; work on
Wednesday at the breakwater, at the garden on Thursday; on Friday at the
breakwater again; and on Saturday till noon also, after which we devoted
the rest of the day to baking, clothes washing and mending, and other
domestic duties. How my mother and 'Cilla would have laughed to see me
at the wash-tub, or hanging out the linen to dry on the furze bushes; or
to have seen Alec using a flat iron which, with great labour, we had
forged, and which was of a peculiar construction, but still very
efficacious in its work. Men are notoriously awkward in their manner of
wringing and other laundry work, and I expect we were no exception to
the general rule. We made our clothes _clean_, and that was all we
required.

Alec was a capital baker, so we had some excellent bread, while my
pastry was not to be sneezed at; in fact, at a rabbit pie I was quite a
_grand chef_. I also introduced several new culinary matters to Alec,
some of which he had never seen before; among them being the all-filling
Norfolk dumpling, which at first he did not seem to care for, but in
time he became inordinately fond of them, and would often ask me to make
him a _pouding de rien_ (a pudding of nothing), which was his idea of
these articles of everyday diet in East Anglia.

But I am not building my breakwater of dumplings, so will get back to
stone; not that I wish the reader to infer that my dumplings were ever
approaching that substance in their degree of firmness.

First we collected all the very large stones we could find in the bay,
and placed them as a foundation for our breakwater; but these only
formed a layer about a foot deep. All these were large stones (some of
them weighed nearly three hundredweight), so to cope with them we made a
kind of four-handled hand barrow, upon which we rolled our rock, and
then taking two handles e