castles, towers, and churches, some of them completely overgrown with ivy.  On this rough slope, under the shelter of the cliff, with the sea at its feet, the villagers have formed their cultivated patches.  The patches, wildly irregular in form, some on such steeply sloping ground as to suggest the idea that they must have been cultivated on all fours, are divided from each other by ridges and by masses of rock, deep fissures in the earth, strips of bramble and thorn and furze bushes.  Altogether the effect was very singular the huge rough mass of jumbled rock and soil, the ruin wrought by Nature in one of her Cromwellian moods, and, scattered irregularly about its surface, the plots or patches of cultivated smoothness—­potato rows, green parallel lines ruled on a grey ground, and big, blue-green, equidistant cabbage-globes—­each plot with its fringe of spike-like onion leaves, crinkled parsley, and other garden herbs.  Here the villagers came by a narrow, steep, and difficult path they had made, to dig in their plots; while, overhead, the gulls, careless of their presence, pass and repass wholly occupied with their own affairs.

I spent hours of rare happiness at this spot in watching the birds.  I could not have seen and heard them to such advantage if their breeding-place had been shared with other species.  Here the herring-gulls had the rock to themselves, and looked their best in their foam-white and pearl-grey plumage and yellow legs and beaks.  While I watched them they watched me; not gathered in groups, but singly or in pairs, scattered up and down all over the face of the precipice above me, perched on ledges and on jutting pieces of rock.  Standing motionless thus, beautiful in form and colour, they looked like sculptured figures of gulls, set up on the projections against the rough dark wall of rock, just as sculptured figures of angels and saintly men and women are placed in niches on a cathedral front.  At first they appeared quite indifferent to my presence, although in some instances near enough for their yellow irides to be visible.  While unalarmed they were very silent, standing in that clear sunshine that gave their whiteness something of a crystalline appearance; or flying to and fro along the face of the cliff, purely for the delight of bathing in the warm lucent air.  Gradually a change came over them.  One by one those that were on the wing dropped on to some projection, until they had all settled down, and, letting my eyes range up and down over the huge wall of rock, it was plain to see that all the birds were watching me.  They had made the discovery that I was a stranger.  In my rough old travel-stained clothes and tweed hat I might have passed for a Branscombe villager, but I did no hoeing and digging in one of the cultivated patches; and when I deliberately sat down on a rock to watch them, they noticed it and became suspicious; and as time went on and I still remained immovable, with my eyes fixed on them, the suspicion and anxiety