“And what’s the good of that?”
“Slip round another way and borrow her. You and I could manage her, couldn’t we?”
“Why, I could manage her myself.”
“Of course you could. We shouldn’t hurt the boat; and we could feel our way in, and see from outside whether it has been a smugglers’ place or no.”
“That’s it,” said Mike; and five minutes after they were working hard with the tutor, as if they had nothing on their minds.
That afternoon, with the sun brighter and the sea and sky looking bluer than ever, the two boys were off for their afternoon expedition, making their way along a rough lane that was very beautiful and very bad. It was bad from the point of view that the fisher-farmers of the island looked upon it as a sort of “no man’s land,” and never favoured it by spreading donkey-cart loads of pebbles or broken granite to fill up the holes trodden in by cows in wet weather, or the tracks made by carts laden with vraick, the sea-weed they collected for manuring their potato and parsnep fields. Consequently, in bad seasons Vince said it was “squishy,” and Mike that it was “squashy.” But in fine summer weather it was beautiful indeed, for Nature seemed to have made up her mind that it was nonsense for a roadway to be made there to act like a scar on the landscape, just to accommodate a few people who wanted to bring up sea-weed, sand and fish from the shore, and harness donkeys to rough carts to do the work when they might more easily have done it themselves by making a rough windlass, such as they had over their wells, and dragging all they wanted directly up the cliff face to the top—a plan which would have done in fifty yards what the donkeys had to go round nearly half a mile to achieve. As to the road being kept up solely because old Joe Daygo had a cottage down in a notch in the granite walls overlooking the sea, that seemed to be absurd.
Consequently, Nature went to work regularly every year to do away with that road, and she set all her children to help. The gorse bushes hung from the sides, thrusting out their prickly sprays covered with orange and yellow blossom and encroached all they could; the heather sprouted and slowly crept here and there, in company with a lovely fine grass that would have made a lover of smooth lawns frantic with envy. Over the heath, ling, and furze the dodder wreathed and wove its delicate tangle, and the thrift raised its lavender heads to nod with satisfaction at the way in which all the plants and wild shrubs were doing their work.
But there were two things which left all the rest behind, and did by far the most to bring the crooked lane back to beauty. They laughed at the two brionies, black and white; for though they made a glorious show, with their convolvulus and deeply cut leaves, and sent forth strands of wonderfully rapid growth to run over the sturdy blackthorn, which produced such splendid sloes, and then hung down festoons of glossy leaves into the lane that quite put the more slow-growing ivy to the blush, still these lovely trailing festoons died back in the winter, while their rival growths kept on. These rivals were the brambles and the wild clematis, which grew and grew in friendly emulation, and ended, in spite of many rebuffs from trampling feet, by shaking hands across the road; the clematis, not content with that, going farther and embracing and tangling themselves up till rudely broken apart by the passers-by—notably by old Joe Daygo, when he went that way home to his solitary cot, instead of walking, out of sheer awkwardness, across somebody’s field or patch.
“I wish father would buy old Joe’s cottage,” said Vince, as the two lads trudged down the lane that afternoon. “We could make it such a lovely place.”
“Yours is right enough,” said Mike, pausing in whistling an old French air a good deal affected by the people.