“With six-foot two of trench, eh, Sam?” I said.
“Eh? What? What do you mean?”
“Why, weren’t you singing something about burying them all. Here, sing us the rest.”
“Nay, nay, nay, my lad; I can’t sing.”
“Why, I heard you, Sam.”
“Ay, but that’s all I know; and I must get on with my job afore they come.”
“Before they come, Sam! Why, they’ll never come. Go and hoe up your cabbages and potatoes and you’ll be doing some good.”
“Nay, lad, this be no time for hoeing up cabbage and ’tater. Why, what for?—ready for the French?”
“French!” I said with a laugh as I leaned over the low wall and looked down the perpendicular cliff at the piled-up masses of fallen fragments. “No French will ever trouble us.”
For it looked ridiculous to imagine that a foreign enemy would ever attempt to make a landing anywhere beneath the grand wall of piled-up rock that protected our coast from a far more dangerous enemy than any French fleet, for the sea was ready to attack and sweep away even the land, and this a foreign fleet could never do.