"Where’s the sense o’ that?" replied Sam, disappointed of the anticipated sport. "What mortal good would it be to any soul alive to make an opening where ’ee’d break yer neck if you come to it?" Dick did not answer, craning his neck to scan the heights above him. The light of the lantern failed to penetrate the overarching gloom. The roof of the cave was invisible, and the walls appeared to rise perpendicularly, with projections here and there that looked, in the spectral glimmer, like the grotesque gargoyles on a church-tower. "I’d like to climb up there," said Dick at length. "Lawk-a-massy, you’d break yer neck for sure. ’Tis a ’mazing hard job to climb the cliff arter gulls’ eggs, but this be death and burial." "We could do it with a ladder." "Our ladder bean’t long enough by half; the only ladders long enough be they in church-tower, and they be too heavy to lug here, and sexton wouldn’t let us take ’em. Scrounch it all, Maister Dick, I do think ’ee be muddled in yer head to think o’ sech daring doings. See now, tide’s comin’ in, and we don’t want to be drownded." "That’s the most sensible thing you’ve said for a while, Sam. We’ll go now, but I won’t give it up. We’ll get a ladder, or make one, and come back another day. I’m determined to find out if there really is an opening." "Well, Feyther says most heads do have a magget in ’em, like turmits, and this be yours; ’tis indeed." They loosed the boat, and paddled out as they had come, Dick resolving, in spite of his follower’s damping attitude, to return before long, and make a thorough exploration of the place. Later in the day, as he walked home from the Parsonage, he was struck with an idea of a contrivance for serving his purpose. He consulted old Reuben about it when he got home, and Sam, on returning from an errand in the village, found his father and Dick hard at work in an outhouse, splicing short lengths of rope, and fixing them at regular intervals between two thin but strong poles about six feet long. "What be doin’, Feyther?" asked Sam. "Use yer eyes, sonny, and put a name to ’t yerself," replied Reuben. "Well, if I was to speak my thought, I’d say ’ee was makin’ a ladder that ’ud let a man down as soon as he put a foot on it." "Then ’tis for you to make it stronger, my son, babe and sucklin’ as ’ee be. T’ud be a sin to let so much cleverness run to seed. Strip off yer coat and lay into it, and keep yer tongue quiet, for if ’ee set all the organs of yer body goin’ at once, you’ll die young." This implied rebuke had the effect of making Sam enter zealously into the work, and before supper two light ladders were finished, each six feet long, which, together with a short ladder of the ordinary kind that Reuben used in his duties about the premises, provided Dick with a total length of eighteen or twenty feet. His notion was to carry these separate pieces down to the cave, and then lash them together to form one continuous whole.