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The Cliffs

     Hallelujah! I just heard of another place to go which sounds exciting---the cliffs. A friend of mine, Leo by name, told me of that place. He said all you have to do is follow along the railroad tracks until, on your right, you see some high cliffs. So, with Georgie and Danny, my two friends, I set out to find another place where we could go when the summer days got dull and boring.
     One day, as I came out of school with Georgie, I remembered that my mother and Georgie's mother were going shopping together. It was the perfect chance to go. We raced home and dressed in our overalls and met at Danny's house. Through a few fibs Danny's mother let him go with us. Danny had only seen the tracks from the road before then and Georgie had only ventured a few hundred feet beyond the bridge, so I was the best acquainted with the tracks, having been about a mile along them until they came to a wide road. They led us through a sort of slum district, past the wide road I spoke of before, and went out into the suburbs of the city. We followed the tracks for about another mile; then, as we were about to turn back and go home (we were tired and hot and we thought Leo was lying), we came to a high trestle, and beyond the trestle there was a bend of the tracks. We agreed that, if we didn't see the cliffs after the bend of the tracks, we would turn back. The district we were in had many small factories and the trestle I spoke of was over a road leading from one of these factories. The trestle seemed to us to be made of the barest essentials. Two girders stretched across above the road, and nailed to these were the wooden ties, and on these, naturally, were the rails.
     Beyond the bridge were the cliffs, weatherworn precipices about sixty feet high, with little ledges cut out about halfway up to give a real mountain-climbing thrill to anyone courageous enough to brave the crumbly and sometimes slippery-wet shale. Abundant blackberries, secluded mud-pools for cooling hot feet, breathless encounters with the neighborhood "gang," toy cars caroming down the cliffs, and sliding down the gravel slides of the nearby gravel company provided many hours of fun and happy memories: the closest we could ever come to a wild-west atmosphere of ruggedness.