"Is Mr. Alan the one who is a miser?" asked Noel.
"A miser!" repeated his mother in surprise. "Who has been telling you such a thing about him?"
Noel told her, pretty correctly, the talk he had heard on the coach.
[CHAPTER IV.]
EXPLORING THE CAVE.
FROM Egloshayle House the nearest way to the sea lay through the glen into which a steep narrow path descended close to the foot of the tower. The boys could never have imagined such a wild lovely place as this glen. Green cliffs with rocky crags jutting from them enclosed the clear brown stream. Rich ivy mantled the crags and purple heather grew thickly about them. On either side the stream were tangles of meadow-sweet, crimson-vetch, honeysuckle and other flowers. Bees and butterflies flitted amid these, while dragon-flies darted to and fro or hovered above the stream.
The boys found so many attractions in the glen that they felt as if they wanted to be in twenty places at once. At its lower end the cliffs grew bleaker and the stream was forced into a narrow, channel between straight black rocks forming what in Scotland, Mrs. Bryden told her boys, was called a linn.
The water descended from level to level, in a series of snowy cascades, to the sea, which at high tide rushed forward to meet it, swelling deep and strong between the rugged cliffs and breaking in great foaming billows over the platforms of rock through which the stream had cut its way. At low tide it lost itself in the yellow sand of a little sheltered cove and rippled in many a tiny streamlet to join the waves.
Into this sanded cove the boys came one morning about a week after their arrival at Egloshayle. The sea was unusually calm, and fell on the shore with a soft murmur. The tide was going out, and as Duke and Noel ran over the sand they came to heaps of beautiful seaweed, and gathered some lovely specimens to carry home. They seldom saw anyone else at this spot, for it was considered dangerous to bathe in the cove, and most of the visitors preferred to spend the morning on the large bathing beach to the west.
Gulls haunted the place. There was quite a congregation of them on the tall rock which stood a few paces from the shore.