in our part of the
country--not sheep such as you generally see about farms, or down to
market, but our little handsome sheep with curly horns that feed along
the sides of the cliffs in all sorts of dangerous places where a false
step would send them headlong six or seven hundred feet, perhaps a
thousand, down to the sea. For we have cliff slopes in places as high
as that, where the edge of the moor seems to have been chopped right
off, and if you are up there you can gaze down at the waves foaming over
the rocks, and if you looked right out over the sea, there away to the
north was Taffyland, as we boys called it, with the long rugged Welsh
coast stretching right and left, sometimes dim and hazy, and sometimes
standing out blue and clear with the mountains rising up in the distance
fold behind fold.

I say I think the sheep used to make the cliff paths to begin with, for
they don't feed up or feed down, but always go along sidewise, unless
they want to get lower, and then they make a zigzag, so far one way and
so far another, backwards and forwards, down the slope till they come to
where it goes straight down to the sea with a raw edge at the top, and
the cliff-face, which keeps crumbling away, in some places lavender and
blue where it is slate, and in others all kinds of tints, as red and
grey, where it's limestone or grit.

In the course of time the sheep leave a regular lot of tracks like tiny
shelves up the side of the sloping cliffs, and the lowest of these gets
taken by the people who are going along the coast, and is trampled down
more and more, till it grows into a regular footpath, such as we were
going along this hot midsummer day.

Part of our way lay close to the edge of the cliff, where it was about
four hundred feet straight down, but a dense wood of oak-trees grew
there, and their trunks formed a regular fence and screen between us and
the edge, so that the pathway was quite safe, though it would not have
troubled us much if it had not been, being used to the place; but in a
short time we were through the wood, and out on the open cliff--from
shade to sunshine.

I ought not to leave that wood, though, without saying something about
it, for just there the trees grew very curiously. Of course you know
what an oak-tree is, and how it grows up tall and rugged and strong, but
our oak-trees didn't grow like that. You've seen horses out in a field
on a stormy day, I suppose, when the wind blows, and the