oblivious of their clamour, as creatures beneath his notice.

Once round the southern side of the Signal Hill the noise of the bar is
lost. Between the hill and the next point--a wild, stern-looking
precipice of black-trap rock--there lies a half a mile or more of
shingly strand, just such as you would see at Pevensey Bay or Deal, but
backed up at high-water mark with piles of drift timber--great dead
trees that have floated from the far northern rivers, their mighty
branches and netted roots bleached white by the sun and wind of many
years, and smelling sweet of the salty sea air. Mingled with the lighter
bits of driftwood and heaps of seaweed are the shells of hundreds of
crayfish--some of the largest are newly cast up by the sea, and the
carapace is yellow and blue; others are burnt red by exposure to the
sun; while almost at every step you crush into the thin backs and
armoured tails of young ones about a foot in length, the flesh of which,
by some mysterious process of nature, has vanished, leaving the skin,
muscles, and beautiful fan-like tail just as fresh as if the crustaceans
were alive. Just here, out among those kelp-covered rocks, you may, on a
moonlight night, catch as many crayfish as you wish--three of them will
be as much as any one would care to carry a mile, for a large,
full-grown "lobster," as they are called locally, will weigh a good ten
pounds.

Once round the precipice we come to a new phase of coastal scenery. From
the high land above us green scrub-covered spur after spur shoots
downward to the shore, enclosing numerous little beaches of coarse sand
and many coloured spiral shells--"Reddies" we boys called them--with
here and there a rare and beautiful cowrie of banded jet black and
pearly white. The sea-wall of rock has here but few pools, being split
up into long, deep, and narrow chasms, into which the gentle ocean swell