skimming and circling, and harshly and hoarsely screaming over the "sad seawaves," and parading, and paddling, and pecking on the sad sea-shore-that is what is to be seen at the foot of those low, lonely sand-hills.

Sickly-green sedge sighs sadly on the sand-hills on the brightest summer-day; their fans of fern have a prematurely-red, autumnal look in spring; the blossoms of the stunted furze-bushes are born blightedbrown. Here and there in the hollows

mopes a rain-pool, or a scummy, salt remnant of an overflowing spring-tide. There are mangy patches of coarse, spiry grass on the sides of some of the hills, and tiny rugs of moss spread almost square on some of the tops; but for the most part they are as barrenly bare as a bald head.

The lack of life upon them is the thing that strikes one. Stray bees and butterflies boom and flit disconsolately over them. The omnipresent hum of insects, seen and unseen, is fitfully so faint there that the sighing sedge relieves the painfully listening ear. Even the rabbits, which are the most numerous inhabitants of the sand-hills, leave many a winding and cup or bowlshaped hollow without a single foot-mark on their silvery sides. The sunbeams, the wind, and the rain, the spray, and hail, and sleet, and snow, are the only travellers, except the insects and the birds, that cross those smooth, symmetrical hollows. On a hushed summer afternoon they have an "enchanted valley " look. The only trees in sight are three blasted ones on the rushtussocked march-land, between the sand

hills and the heath, despairingly stretching their gaunt arms landwards as if arrested in a flight from doom.

I describe the place as I remember to have seen and felt it a good many years ago, but probably it is little altered now; being one of the spots that defy "improvement," and, with everything changing around them, preserve their lonely identity from generation to generation. When I knew those hills from eyesight, there was a single cottage in one of their loneliest seaward hollows: a cottage roughly built of stone picked up on the sea-shore, and daubed with whitewash, which the sea-breeze had blotched. The only garden was the roof of coarse thatch, black with damp, and green with weeds. There was some story about the hovel having been very useful in the old

smuggling days, but at the time of which I write its tenants were an elderly man and a young woman, of whom little was known; but at any rate, they were not smugglers. Although they had been for nearly a score of years tenants of "Rabbit Hall" (as the hut was satirically called), they were still looked upon as strangers by the people of the little village on the other side of the heath. The man was known as Malyon, and, that being an "outlandish name" in those parts, the villagers distrusted it. He went neither to church nor to the public-house, and, therefore, they had small chance of getting into talk with him, and had no data on which to assign him a place in any of their few rough moral categories. The little talk they did get with him was another puzzle. He did

not talk like" the gentry," he did not talk as they did; and, although they were sharp enough to guess that "working-folk" pronounced their words in the same way in the parts, wherever they might be, he came from, they felt that the man was not "one of their sort"-did not think their thoughts or share their feelings. Herodias Malyon was no more popular than her father amongst the villagers. Although she had grown up from a baby into a young woman at Rabbit Hall, she had no friend, no ordinary acquaintance in the village. There was a half-petulant, half-proud look in her handsome face-as if she was discontented with her lot, but would not condescend to grumble about it -which the villagers resented as a liberty. What right had such as she, they reasoned,