“I wish I had brought a box of matches,” said Loveday hotly; “then I’d burn the straw, and they wouldn’t be able to play such a trick again.”
“You needn’t burn it,” said Aaron; “we’ll carry it away and heave it to cliff. If they gets it and brings it back from there—well, they’m welcome to.”
Loveday agreed with delight, and both of them chuckled many times over their cleverness in out-witting the “little people” as they struggled to pack the straw into two bundles bound round by Loveday’s over-all and Aaron’s tunic. It was not a very easy task, and the garden and the path over which they dragged their loads were not quite as neat and speckless as fairy fingers would have left them. But the pair did not see that; all their thoughts were bent on “heaving” the straw over the cliff into the sea. And perhaps it was well for their parents and those who loved them, that they did not see those two as they leaned over the edge of the steep cliff-top and shook out their pinafores over the dizzy heights, then watched the straw as it whirled down and down to those awful depths below, where the sea dashed and foamed like a caldron, lashed to anger by the sharp rocks on which it flung itself. An inch or so farther, the least slip, the merest over-balancing as they shook out their loads, and they too would have gone whirling down through the mist, to the jagged rocks, and the hungry waves all those feet below, and no earthly power could have saved them from a fearful death.
“They shook out their pinafores over the dizzy heights.”
CHAPTER XII
THE PISKIES CAUGHT
BOTH Aaron and Loveday were very tired when, for the third time, they rose at dawn, crept out of the house, and up the cliff; and if it had not been for the excitement of seeing what their enemies had done to the vegetable bed during the night, they would probably have left their pisky work, for one morning at least. But Loveday was very anxious to see if the bad piskies had done anything further when they found all the straw had been taken away from them. Aaron was excited, too, but he was more sleepy, and they were both just the least bit cross as they clambered up the slippery path.
“I’m jolly glad I am not a real pisky,” he said, “to have to do this every night. I reckon folks would have to do their work theirselves if ’twas left to me.”