elf? Lord, ma'am, for what age d'ye take me?" Cai caught up
the slack of the rope and hitched it taut over his shoulder. He was
rejuvenated. He made a spring for the ladder, and went up it much as
twenty years ago he would have swarmed up the ratlines. "Make yourself
small," he commanded, as Skin, at imminent risk of falling, drew to one
side before his onset. Cai was past him in a jiffy, over the eaves,
balancing himself with miraculous ease on the slippery thatch.
"Now ease up the ladder!"

He had anchored himself by pure trick of balance, and was pulling with a
steady hand almost as soon as Skin, collecting his wits, could reach out
to fend the ladder off from crushing the edge of the eaves. Ten seconds
later, by seaman's sleight of foot, he had gained a second anchorage
half-way up the slope, had gathered up all the slack of the rope into a
seaman's coil, and with a circular sweep of the arm had flung it deftly
around the chimney. The end, instead of sliding down to his hand,
hitched itself among the thorns of the rampant Devoniensis. Did this
daunt him? It checked him for an instant only. The next, he had
balanced himself for a fresh leap, gained the roof-ridges, and, seated
astride of it, was hauling up the ladder, hand over fist, close to the
chimney-base.

The marvel was, the close thatch showed no trace of having been trampled
or disturbed.

"Darn the feller, he's as ajjile as a cat!" swore William Skin.

"Pass up the clippers, you below!" Cai commanded, forgetting that the
man was deaf. "If your mistress'll stand back in the path a bit, I'll
pick out the shoots one by one and hold 'em up for her to see, so's she
can tell me which to cut away."

"You'll scratch your hands to ribbons," Mrs Bosenna warned him.

"'Tisn't worth while comin' down for a pair of hedgin' gloves. . . .
I say, though--I've a better notion! 'Stead of lettin' this fellow run
riot here around the chimney-stack, why not have him down and peg him
horizontal, more or less, across and along the thatch, where he can be
seen?"

"Capital!" she agreed. "He'd put out more than twice the number of
blooms too. They do always best when laid lateral."

"He'll come down bodily with a little coaxin'. The question is how to
peg him when he's down?"

"Rick-spars," answered Mrs Bosenna promptly. "The small kind. There's
dozens in the waggon-house loft." She signalled to William Skin to come
down, bawled an order in his ear, and