You and I could manage her, couldn't we ?" "Why, I could manage her myself." "Of course you could.

We shouldn't hurt the boat; and we could feel our way in, and see from outside whether it has been a smugglers' place or no." "That's it," said Mike; and five minutes after they were working hard with the tutor, as if they had nothing on their minds.
That afternoon, with the sun brighter and the sea and sky looking bluer than ever, the two boys were off for their afternoon expedition, making their way along a rough lane that was very beautiful and very bad.

It was bad from the point of view that the fisher-farmers of the island looked upon it as a sort of "no man's land," and never favoured it by spreading donkey-cart loads of pebbles or broken granite to fill up the holes trodden in by cows in wet weather, or the tracks made by carts laden with vraick, the sea-weed they collected for manuring their potato and parsnep fields.

Consequently, in bad seasons Vince said it was "squishy," and Mike that it was "squashy." But in fine summer weather it was beautiful indeed, for Nature seemed to have made up her mind that it was nonsense for a roadway to be made there to act like a scar on the landscape, just to accommodate a few people who wanted to bring up sea-weed, sand and fish from the shore, and harness donkeys to rough carts to do the work when they might more easily have done it themselves by making a rough windlass, such as they had over their wells, and dragging all they wanted directly up the cliff face to the top--a plan which would have done in fifty yards what the donkeys had to go round nearly half a mile to achieve.

As to the road being kept up solely because old Joe Daygo had a cottage down in a notch in the granite walls overlooking the sea, that seemed to be absurd.
Consequently, Nature went to work regularly every year to do away with that road, and she set all her children to help.