Jagger removed his eyes and the tense look left his face. For a while he did not speak and the father was also silent. Then he said: “I’ll try to see her to-morrow. She’ll be going to Betty Walker’s and I can meet her as she comes down t’ Cove road. But she’s a temper of her own and I bet a dollar we fratch.” Something not unlike a sigh, but with a touch of impatience in it, escaped Maniwel’s lips. “If you meet her wi’ your prickles out you might as well stop at home,” he said. “Turn ’em inside so as they’ll check your tongue, and then you’ll maybe win through.” CHAPTER IX IN WHICH ONE LOVER WALKS OUT AND ANOTHER WALKS IN PURE is the air on Mawm moor, charged with the virtues of the sea and the strength of the hills! and pure are the streams that fill the runnels and tinkle their accompaniment to the music of the breeze as it sweeps the strings of bent grass and reed! Good and desirable as these things are, however, Mawm can claim in their possession nothing extraordinary. There are other moors where the air is as heavily charged with life’s elixir and the waters course as sweet and fresh. But in the Cove, Mawm has something altogether unique; it has, as I have said, one of the most imposing natural wonders of the land. To picture it imagine yourself first on a wide stretch of moorland, hemmed in by mountains—a grassy moor, whose surface is scarred by great terraces of fissured limestone in whose crevices the winds and the birds have dropped seeds of ferns and flowers that peep above the tops and splash the scene with colour. Imagine an impossible giant furnished with an impossible spade, standing on the edge of the moor where it begins to fall steeply down into the valley. He is a giant of the unrecorded past when impossible things happened; when frozen waters sundered continents and shattered mountains and scooped out valleys; when great rocks were hurled as if they had been shuttlecocks from peaks that seemed firm as the world’s foundations, and embedded themselves on far distant slopes where they were alien to the soil. It is a hollow, crescent-shaped spade on which our giant sets his foot, and he thrusts it vertically through the solid limestone, piling up the débris (soon to be covered with the short grass of the moors) on either side as he proceeds until instead of the green declivity you see a perpendicular cliff, little short of three hundred feet in height and nearly a quarter of a mile wide, dazzlingly white when the southern sun rests there; spectral in the colder moonlight.