British government. I do not
speak from my own case, in which they discovered nothing.

By the time these things had been discussed, my host (who was always
particular about his dress) came down to dinner, and not until that was
over could I speak of the subject which had brought me there. No sooner
had I begun my tale than they both perceived that it must neither be
flurried nor interrupted, least of all should it be overheard.

"Come into my lock-up," cried the Major; "or, better still, let us go
out of doors. We can sit in my snuggery on the cliff, with only gulls
and jackdaws to listen, and mount my telescope and hoist my flag, and
the men know better than to skulk their work. I can see every son of a
gun of them as clearly as if I had them on parade. You wish Mrs. Hockin
to come, I suppose. Very well, let us be off at once. I shall count my
fellows coming back from dinner."

With a short quick step the Major led the way to a beautifully situated
outpost at a corner of the cliff, where land and sea for many a fair
league rolled below. A niche of the chalk had been cleverly enlarged and
scooped into a shell-shaped bower, not, indeed, gloriously overhung, as
in the far West might have been, but broken of its white defiant glare
by climbing and wandering verdure. Seats and slabs of oak were fixed to
check excess of chalkiness, and a parapet of a pattern which the Major
called Egyptian saved fear of falling down the cliff, and served to
spread a paper on, or to rest a telescope.

"From this point," said the Major, crossing wiry yet substantial legs,
"the whole of my little domain may be comprised as in a bird's-eye view.
It is nothing, of course, much less than nothing, compared with the Earl
of Crowcombe's, or the estate of Viscount Gamberley; still, such as it
is, it carries my ideas, and it has an extent of marine frontage such
as they might envy. We are asked 5 pounds per foot for a thread of land
fronting on a highway, open to every kind of annoyance, overlooked,
without any thing to look at. How much, then, per fathom (or measure, if
you please, by cable-lengths) is land worth fronting the noble, silent,
uncontaminating, healthful sea? Whence can come no coster-mongers'
cries, no agitating skir of bagpipes or the maddening hurdy-gurdy, no
German band expecting half a crown for the creation of insanity; only
sweet murmur of the wavelets, and the melodious whistle of a boatman
catching your breakfast lobster. Wh