ear.

"Well," said Will, making some more arrows up the perpendicular line
which represented, the face of the cliff, "that's how the wind does. It
goes right up here, and gets some distance before it can stop, and then
it curves over and flies right over the land, getting lower as it goes,
till it touches the ground once more. There, that's it; and those two
dots are you and me."

He drew some more arrows, with Dick looking solemnly on, and the result
was that Will's sketch of the wind's action against a cliff was
something like the following arrangement of lines and arrows, which
illustrate a curious phenomenon of nature, easily noticeable during a
gale of wind at the edge of some perpendicular cliff.

Dick felt disposed to dispute his friend's scientific reasoning; but
Will showed him by throwing his handkerchief down from the edge of the
cliff, when it was caught by the gale before it had gone down a dozen
feet, and whisked up above their heads and then away over the land.

A handful of grass was treated the same, and then Dick sent down his own
handkerchief, which went down twice as far as Will's before the wind
took it and blew it right into a crevice in the face of the cliff, where
it stuck fast.

"There's a go," cried Dick. "Oh! I say, how can we get it?"

Will went to the edge of the cliff and looked over before shaking his
head.

"We can't get it now," he said. "I'll ask Josh to come with a rope when
the wind's gone down, and he'll lower me over."

"What--down there--with a rope?" said Dick, changing colour. "No,
don't."

"Why not?" said Will. "That's nothing to going down a mine-shaft."

Dick shuddered.

"Or going down the cliff after eggs as I do sometimes. We have
gentlemen here now and then who collect eggs, and I've been down after
them often in places where you can't climb."

"But I shouldn't like you to go down for me."

"Why not?"

"You might fall," said Dick.

"I shouldn't like to do that," said Will, smiling. Then in a
thoughtful, gloomy way--"It wouldn't matter much. I've no one to care
about me."

"How can you say that?" cried Dick sharply. "Why, your uncle seemed to
think a deal of you."

"He's very kind to me," said Will sadly; "but I've always been an
expense to him."

"Then," cried Dick boldly, "you ought to be ashamed of yourself."

"What--for being an expense to him?" said Will wistfully.

"No; because you couldn't help that when you were a little fellow.