In the harbour the water was so low that the _Pretty Ruth_, Abram Marion's lugger--named, for some reason that no one could see, after the old man's wife--was lying over nearly on her beam-ends, so that, as Josh Helston, who was on board, went to and fro along the deck with a swab in his hands it was impossible to help thinking that if nature had made his legs like his arms, one very much shorter than the other, he would have found locomotion far easier. As it was, he had to walk with one knee very much, bent, so greatly was the deck inclined; but it did not trouble him, his feet being bare and his toes spreading out widely and sticking to the clean narrow planks as if they were, like the cuttle-fish, provided with suckers. Josh was swabbing away at the clinging fish-scales and singing in a sweet musical voice an old west-country ditty in which a lady was upbraiding someone for trying "to persuade a maiden to forsake the jacket blue," of course the blue jacket containing some smart young sailor. "Hi, Josh!" "Oh, it's you, is it?" said Josh, rubbing his nose with the mop handle. "No, I'm busy. I sha'n't come." "Yes, do come, Josh," said Will, crossing three or four luggers and sitting on the rail of the _Pretty Ruth_. "What's the good, lad?" "Good, Josh? Why, I've told you before. I can't bear this life." "Fisherman's a good honest life," said Josh sententiously. "Not when a lad feels that he's a dependant and a burden on his friends," cried Will excitedly. "I want to get on, Josh. I want to succeed, and--there, I knew you'd come." For Josh had thrown away the mop with an angry movement, and then dragging on a pair of great blue stockings he put on shoes and followed Will without a word. Out along the beach and away from the village, and in and out among the rocks for quite two miles, till they were where the cliff went sheer up like a vast wall of rugged granite, at a part of which, where a mass of broken stone had either fallen or been thrown down, Will stopped and looked round to see if they were observed. As they were alone with no other watchers than a swarthy-looking cormorant sitting on a sunny lodge drying his wings, and a shag or two perched with outstretched neck, narrowly observing them, Will climbed up, followed by Josh, till they were upon a broad shelf a hundred and fifty feet above the sea--a wild solitary place, where the heap of debris, lichened and wave-beaten, was explained, for mining operations had once gone on hero, and a great square hole yawned black and awful at their feet. They had evidently been there before, for Will stepped close to a spot where the rock overhung, and reaching in, drew out some pieces of granite, and then from where it was hidden a large coil of stout rope, and threw it on the broken fragments around. "It's your doing, mind, you know," said Josh. "I don't like the gashly job at all." "Yes, it's my doing," said Will. "And you mean to go down?" "I do, Josh, for certain."