'Thank you, a message goes with them. Where is he, sir?'
'I believe on the White Cliff.'
'What, wool-gathering? Is he doing that when supposed to be at his studies?'
'You have a pert tongue. He likes to watch the birds.'
'Thank you, sir. I will look for him there. It is all on my way back.'
Winefred, instead of taking the short lane, now made the circuit of the down, ascending by the last house of the long street above the tiny bay, where were a flagstaff and benches, on which latter in almost all weathers fishermen and boys sat and yarned, disputed and smoked.
She asked them about Jack, and learned that he was on the down. 'I have socks for him from his father,' she explained.
Her way led under and around fragmentary masses of chalk crag belted with flints; and where the flints had fallen out, leaving the surface pockmarked, gulls and guillemots flew about chattering and screaming, and now and again a nimble tern, the swallow of the sea, glanced by.
White Cliff was, in fact, a paradise of birds. The tooth of the storm had gnawed into its friable surface, and bitten out chunks, and scooped caves so as to afford for the birds dry and abundant, and, above all, secure lodging-places where to breed. The brow overhung, rendering their nesting shelves inaccessible from above, and from below a scramble up the lower sandstone beds was absolutely impracticable owing to their friability.
The white face of the cliff was incessantly changing, though by slow degrees; masses fell off, fresh indentations were formed, and at the base lay a mass of broken rock about which the waves churned; under which and over which, by tunnels and by furrows, the water rushed and returned of a milky tinge.