CHAPTER TWO.
OUR CLIFFS.
I believe the sheep began all the creepy paths 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 rain beats.

If they have no trees, hedges, or wall to get under, they always turn their backs to the wind, and you can see their tails and manes streaming out and blown all over them.
Well there's no shelter out there on our coast, only in the caves, and the oak-trees there do just the same as the horses, for they seem to turn their backs to the wind; and their boughs look as if they are being blown close down to the side of the cliff slope and spread out ready to spring up again as soon as the wind has passed.