golden fire to the cliff's
edge. The side nearest to them was open grass, and fairly bristled with
notice-boards.

"Fee-rocious old cove, this," said Stalky, reading the nearest.
"'_Prosecuted with the utmost rigour of the law_. G. M. Dabney, Col.,
J.P.,' an' all the rest of it. 'Don't seem to me that any chap in his
senses would trespass here, does it?"

"You've got to prove damage 'fore you can prosecute for anything! 'Can't
prosecute for trespass," said McTurk, whose father held many acres in
Ireland. "That's all rot!"

"Glad of that, 'cause this looks like what we wanted. Not straight
across, Beetle, you blind lunatic! Anyone could spot us half a mile off.
This way; and furl up your beastly butterfly-net."

Beetle disconnected the ring, thrust the net into a pocket, shut up
the handle to a two-foot stave, and slid the cane-ring round his waist.
Stalky led inland to the wood, which was, perhaps, a quarter of a mile
from the sea, and reached the fringe of the brambles.

"_Now_ we can get straight down through the furze, and never show up
at all," said the tactician. "Beetle, go ahead and explore. Snf! Snf!
Beastly stink of fox somewhere!"

On all fours, save when he clung to his spectacles, Beetle wormed into
the gorse, and presently announced between grunts of pain that he had
found a very fair fox-track. This was well for Beetle, since Stalky
pinched him _a tergo_. Down that tunnel they crawled. It was evidently
a highway for the inhabitants of the combe; and, to their inexpressible
joy, ended, at the very edge of the cliff, in a few square feet of dry
turf walled and roofed with impenetrable gorse.

"By gum! There isn't a single thing to do except lie down," said Stalky,
returning a knife to his pocket. "Look here!"

He parted the tough stems before him, and it was as a window opened on
a far view of Lundy, and the deep sea sluggishly nosing the pebbles a
couple of hundred feet below. They could hear young jackdaws squawking
on the ledges, the hiss and jabber of a nest of hawks somewhere out of
sight; and, with great deliberation, Stalky spat on to the back of a
young rabbit sunning himself far down where only a cliff-rabbit could
have found foot-hold. Great gray and black gulls screamed against the
jackdaws; the heavy-scented acres of bloom round them were alive with
low-nesting birds, singing or silent as the shadow of the wheeling hawks
passed and returned; and on the naked turf across the combe rabbits