the plover across the brown heather, and watch their strange, broken
flight as they fly low, and waver, and seem to fall as if you had
winged them--sitting there quietly with your hands before you and
intending no harm to any bird on God's earth--and then with a sudden
turn, which shows you all the white underpart of their wings, rising
again and flying strongly, their broad black wings dark against the
evening sky. All this may be had by anyone who will walk solitarily
and with seeing eyes.

How beautiful are birds in flight!--the dart of a kingfisher, the sweep
of a hawk, the dip and turn of a swallow, the tremulous beat of a
rising lark, even the scurry of a park sparrow for the little bit of
bread you throw him, all different and all beautiful; and what tiny,
ineffectual, maimed creatures they are when they are dead, and their
wings folded! What pitiful little structures of flesh and bones and
tiny heart and brain to be so bright and swift in the wide air!

The road rounds a headland and dips again to Woody Bay. The sweep of
the cliffs here is bold and beautiful, the bay is quite a wide sweeping
curve for this land of creek and gorge, and the slopes of the cliffs
are heavily wooded (which has probably led to the present corruption of
the name from the earlier form of Wooda Bay); but there has been an
outbreak of new houses and a new sanded road, which alarmed me, being
in the mind for birds and solitude, and I kept the high white road
which goes round the summit of the cliffs. Woody Bay is beginning to
be popular in the summer months among those less conventional folk who
like to live off the beaten track during their holidays, and are not
frightened by long distances or difficulties of access, but it is still
quite a tiny place and has not yet suffered that exploitation of the
picturesque which has overtaken Ilfracombe and Torquay, and many
beautiful spots in Devon. Seen from the high road that runs round the
cup of the hills its sprinkle of new little pink houses below look like
toys, and their dainty chalet-villa architecture fits the illusion; so
also does its smoothed green terrace of fields, which seem no bigger
than the nursery tablecloth, with Noah's ark animals, cows and horses,
feeding on them.

The road crosses the stream which runs into the bay, and I rested here,
sitting on the parapet of the bridge, before I took to the unshaded,
stony white upper road. There was a pleasant sound of falling wat