The parishioners had built their new schoolhouse near the church, and it lay about midway between Bishop's Court and Ballamona. It was also about half-way down the road that led to the sea, and that was a proximity of never-ending delight. After school, in the long summer evenings, the scholars would troop down to the shore in one tumultuous company, the son of the Bishop with the son of the cobbler, the Deemster's little girl with the big girl of Jabez, who sent his child on charity. Ragged and well-clad, clean and dirty, and the biggest lad "rigging" the smallest, and not caring a ha'porth if his name was the name of the Deemster or the name of Billy the Gawk. Hand-in-hand, Danny and Ewan, with Mona between, would skip and caper along the sands down to where the gray rocks of the Head jutted out into the sea and bounded the universe; Mona prattling and singing, shaking out her wavy hair to the wind, dragging Danny aside to look at a seaweed, and pulling Ewan to look at a shell, tripping down to the water's edge, until the big bearded waves touched her boots, and then back once more with a half-frightened, half-affected, laughter-loaded scream. Then the boys would strip and bathe, and Mona, being only a woman, would mind the men's clothes, or they would shout all together at the gulls, and Danny would mock Mother Cary's chicken and catch the doleful cry of the cormorant, and pelt with pebbles the long-necked bird as it sat on the rocks; or he would clamber up over the slippery seaweed, across the sharp slate ribs to where the sea-pinks grew in the corries and the sea-duck laid her eggs, and sing out from some dizzy height to where Ewan held his breath below and Mona stood crying and trembling on the sands. What times for Danny! How the lad seemed to swell and grow every day of life! Before he was ten he had outgrown Ewan by half an inch, and gone through a stand-up fight with every ruffian under twelve. Then, down among the fishermen on the beach, what sport! Knocking about among the boats, pulling at the oars like mad, or tugging at the sheets, baling out and pushing off, and riding away over the white breakers, and shouting for pure devilment above the plash of the water. "Aw, man, it's all for the happy the lad feels inside," said Billy Quilleash. Danny and Billy Quilleash were sworn chums, and the little sand-boy learned all the old salt's racy sayings, and went home to Bishop's Court and fired them off at his father. "There's a storm coming," the Bishop said one day, looking up at the scudding clouds. "Ay, ay," said Danny, with his small eye askew, "the long cat's tail was going off at a slant a while ago, and now the round thick skate yonder is hanging mortal low." "The wind is rising," the Bishop said on another occasion. "Ay, Davy's putting on the coppers for the parson," said the young heretic.