The children went to the seaside for a month, and lived in a flint village on the bare windy chalk Downs, quite thirty miles away from home. They made friends with an old shepherd, called Mr Dudeney, who had known their Father when their Father was little. He did not talk like their own people in the Weald of Sussex, and he used different names for farm things, but he understood how they felt, and let them go with him. He had a tiny cottage about half a mile from the village, where his wife made mead from thyme honey, and nursed sick lambs in front of a coal fire, while Old Jim, who was Mr Dudeney's sheep-dog's father, lay at the door. They brought up beef bones for Old Jim (you must never give a sheep-dog mutton bones), and if Mr Dudeney happened to be far in the Downs, Mrs Dudeney would tell the dog to take them to him, and he did.
One August afternoon when the village water-cart had made the street smell specially townified, they went to look for their shepherd as usual, and, as usual, Old Jim crawled over the doorstep and took them in charge. The sun was hot, the dry grass was very slippery, and the distances were very distant.
'It's Just like the sea,' said Una, when Old Jim halted in the shade of a lonely flint barn on a bare rise. 'You see where you're going, and - you go there, and there's nothing between.'
Dan slipped off his shoes. 'When we get home I shall sit in the woods all day,' he said.
'Whuff!' said Old Jim, to show he was ready, and struck across a long rolling stretch of turf. Presently he asked for his beefbone.
'Not yet,' said Dan. 'Where's Mr Dudeney? Where's Master?'
Old Jim looked as if he thought they were mad, and asked again.
'Don't you give it him,' Una cried. 'I'm not going to be left howling in a desert.'
'Show, boy! Show!' said Dan, for the Downs seemed as bare as the palm of your hand.
Old Jim sighed, and trotted forward. Soon they spied the blob of Mr Dudeney's hat against the sky a long way off.
'Right! All right!' said Dan. Old Jim wheeled round, took his bone carefully between his blunted teeth, and returned to the shadow of the old barn, looking just like a wolf. The children went on. Two kestrels hung bivvering and squealing above them.
A gull flapped lazily along the white edge of the cliffs. The curves of the Downs shook a little in the heat, and so did Mr Dudeney's distant head.
They walked toward it very slowly and found themselves staring into a horseshoe-shaped hollow a hundred feet deep, whose steep sides were laced with tangled sheep-tracks. The flock grazed on the flat at the bottom, under charge of Young Jim. Mr Dudeney sat comfortably knitting on the edge of the slope, his crook between his knees. They told him what Old Jim had done.
'Ah, he thought you could see my head as soon as he did. The closeter you be to the turf the more you see things. You look warm-like,'said Mr Dudeney.
'We be,' said Una, flopping down. 'And tired.'
'Set beside o' me here. The shadow'll begin to stretch out in a little while, and a heat-shake o' wind will come up with it that'll overlay your eyes like so much wool.'
'We don't want to sleep,' said Una indignantly; but she settled herself as she spoke, in the first strip of early afternoon shade.
'O' course not. You come to talk with me same as your father used. He didn't need no dog to guide him to Norton Pit.'
'Well, he belonged here,' said Dan, and laid himself down at length on the turf.
'He did. And what beats me is why he went off to live among them messy trees in the Weald, when he might ha' stayed here and looked all about him. There's no profit to trees. They draw the lightning, and sheep shelter under 'em, and so, like as not, you'll lose a half-score ewes struck dead in one storm. Tck! Your father knew that.'
'Trees aren't messy.' Una rose on her elbow. 'And what about firewood? I don't like coal.'
'Eh? You lie a piece more uphill and you'll lie more natural,' said Mr Dudeney, with his provoking deaf smile. 'Now press your face down and smell to the turf. That's Southdown thyme which makes our Southdown mutton beyond compare, and, my mother told me, 'twill cure anything except broken necks, or hearts. I forget which.'
They sniffed, and somehow forgot to lift their cheeks from the soft thymy cushions.
'You don't get nothing like that in the Weald. Watercress, maybe?' said Mr Dudeney.
'But we've water - brooks full of it - where you paddle in hot weather,' Una replied, watching a yellow-and-violet-banded snail-shell close to her eye.
'Brooks flood. Then you must shift your sheep - let alone foot-rot afterward. I put more dependence on a dew-pond any day.'
'How's a dew-pond made?' said Dan, and tilted his hat over his eyes. Mr Dudeney explained.
The air trembled a little as though it could not make up its mind whether to slide into the Pit or move across the open. But it seemed easiest to go downhill, and the children felt one soft puff after another slip and sidle down the slope in fragrant breaths that baffed on their eyelids. The little whisper of the sea by the cliffs joined with the whisper of the wind over the grass, the hum of insects in the thyme, the ruffle and rustle of the flock below, and a thickish mutter deep in the very chalk beneath them. Mr Dudeney stopped explaining, and went on with his knitting.
They were roused by voices. The shadow had crept halfway down the steep side of Norton Pit, and on the edge of it, his back to them, Puck sat beside a half-naked man who seemed busy at some work. The wind had dropped, and in that funnel of ground every least noise and movement reached them like whispers up a water-Pipe.
'That is clever,' said Puck, leaning over. 'How truly you shape it!'
'Yes, but what does The Beast care for a brittle flint tip? Bah!'
The man flicked something contemptuously over his shoulder. It fell between Dan and Una - a beautiful dark-blue flint arrow-head still hot from the maker's hand.
The man reached for another stone, and worked away like a thrush with a snail-shell.
