an help you to come back?"

"Tom Bodger, uncle? But how's he to get back?"

"I'll give him some shillings, and he can pay one of the smugglers to
give him a lift home."

"Thank you, uncle," cried the boy, in an eager way, which showed plainly
enough how well satisfied he was with the arrangement.

"Don't worry me. Be off!" said the old man, bending over his writing
again.

Aleck needed no further orders, and hurried out into the well-kept
garden, where everything looked healthy and flourishing, sheltered as it
was from the fierce winds of all quarters by the fact that it lay in a
depression formed by the sinking of some two or three acres of land,
possibly from the undermining of the sea in far distant ages, at the end
of a narrow rift or chasm in the cliffs which guarded the shores, the
result being that, save in one spot nearest the sea, the grounds
possessed a natural cliff-like wall some fifty or sixty feet high, full
of rift and shelf, the nesting-place of innumerable birds. Here all was
wild and beautiful; great curtains of ivy draped the natural walls, oak
and sycamore flourished gloriously in the shelter as far as the top of
the cliff, and there the trees ceased to grow upward and branched
horizontally instead, so that from the level land outside it seemed as
if Nature had cut all the tops off level, as indeed she had, by means of
the sharp cutting winds.

Aleck followed the garden path without looking back at the vine and
creeper-clad house in its shelter, and made for one corner of the garden
where the walls overlapped, and, passing round one angle, he was
directly after in a zigzag rift, shut in by more lofty, natural walls,
but with the path sloping downward, with the consequence that the walls
grew higher, till at the end of about three hundred yards from the
garden they were fully a couple of hundred feet from base to summit, the
base being nearly level with the sea. This latter was hidden till the
lad had passed round another angle of cliff, when he obtained a glimpse
of the deep blue water, flecked here and there with silvery foam, but
hidden again directly as he followed the zigzag rift over a flooring of
rough stones which had fallen from the towering perpendicular sides, and
which were here only some thirty or forty feet apart, and completely
shut out the sunshine and a good deal of the light.

Another angle of the zigzag rift was passed, and then the rugged stony
flooring gave place to da