ed stroke of iron on an anvil. I thought it the
gobble of water in clanging caves deep down below.

"It might be a bell," I said.

The old man chuckled joyously. He was my cicerone for the nonce; had
come out of his chair by the ingle-nook to taste a little the salt of
life. The north-easter flashed in the white cataracts of his eyes and
woke a feeble activity in his scrannel limbs. When the wind blew loud,
his daughter had told me, he was always restless, like an imprisoned
sea-gull. He would be up and out. He would rise and flap his old draggled
pinions, as if the great air fanned an expiring spark into flame.

"It is a bell!" he cried--"the bell of old St. Dunstan's, that was
swallowed by the waters in the dark times."

"Ah," I said. "That is the legend hereabouts."

"No legend, sir--no legend. Where be the tombstones of drownded mariners
to prove it such? Not one to forty that they has in other sea-board
parishes. For why? Dunstan bell sounds its warning, and not a craft will
put out."

"There is the storm cone," I suggested.

He did not hear me. He was punching with his staff at one of a number of
little green mounds that lay about us.

"I could tell you a story of these," he said. "Do you know where we
stand?"

"On the site of the old churchyard?"

"Ay, sir; though it still bore the name of the new yard in my first
memory of it."

"Is that so? And what is the story?"

He dwelt a minute, dense with introspection. Suddenly he sat himself down
upon a mossy bulge in the turf, and waved me imperiously to a place
beside him.

"The old order changeth," he said. "The only lasting foundations of men's
works shall be godliness and law-biding. Long ago they builded a new
church--here, high up on the cliffs, where the waters could not reach;
and, lo! the waters wrought beneath and sapped the foundations, and the
church fell into the sea."

"So I understand," I said.

"The godless are fools," he chattered knowingly. "Look here at these
bents--thirty of 'em, may be. Tombstones, sir; perished like man his
works, and the decayed stumps of them coated with salt grass."

He pointed to the ragged edge of the cliff a score paces away.

"They raised it out there," he said, "and further--a temple of bonded
stone. They thought to bribe the Lord to a partnership in their
corruption, and He answered by casting down the fair mansion into the
waves."

I said, "Who--who, my friend?"

"They that builded the church,"