One morning, while passing on foot along the coast-wall from Bridlington to Flambro’, on turning my eyes from the sea, I was confronted by a thing which for a moment or two struck me with the most profound astonishment.  I had come to a mansion, surrounded by trees, three hundred yards from the cliffs:  and there, on a path at the bottom of the domain, right before me, was a board marked:  ’Trespassers will be Prosecuted.’  At once a mad desire—­the first which I had had—­to laugh, to roar with laughter, to send wild echoes of merriment clapping among the chalk gullies, and abroad on the morning air, seized upon me:  but I kept it under, though I could not help smiling at this poor man, with his little delusion that a part of the earth was his.

Here the cliffs are, I should say, seventy feet high, broken by frequent slips in the upper stratum of clay, and, as I proceeded, climbing always, I encountered some rather formidable gullies in the chalk, down and then up which I had to scramble, till I came to a great mound or barrier, stretching right across the great promontory, and backed by a natural ravine, this, no doubt, having been raised as a rampart by some of those old invading pirate-peoples, who had their hot life-scuffle, and are done now, like the rest.  Going on, I came to a bay in the cliff, with a great number of boats lodged on the slopes, some quite high, though the declivities are steep; toward the inner slopes is a lime-kiln which I explored, but found no one there.  When I came out on the other side, I saw the village, with an old tower at one end, on a bare stretch of land; and thence, after an hour’s rest in the kitchen of a little inn, went out to the coast-guard station, and the lighthouse.

Looking across the sea eastward, the light-keepers here must have seen that thick cloud of convolving browns and purples, perhaps mixed with small tongues of fire, slowly walking the water, its roof in the clouds, upon them:  for this headland is in precisely the same longitude as London; and, reckoning from the hour when, as recorded in the Times, the cloud was seen from Dover over Calais, London and Flambro’ must have been overtaken soon after three o’clock on the Sunday afternoon, the 25th July.  At sight in open daylight of a doom so gloomy—­prophesied, but perhaps hoped against to the last, and now come—­the light-keepers must have fled howling, supposing them to have so long remained faithful to duty:  for here was no one, and in the village very few.  In this lighthouse, which is a circular white tower, eighty feet high, on the edge of the cliff, is a book for visitors to sign their names:  and I will write something down here in black and white:  for the secret is between God only, and me:  After reading a few of the names, I took my pencil, and I wrote my name there.

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