was the office of my solicitors, from whom I drew my income twice a year.
It was a life in which I delighted; and I fully thought to have grown old
upon the march, and at last died in a ditch.

It was my whole business to find desolate corners, where I could camp
without the fear of interruption; and hence, being in another part of the
same shire, I bethought me suddenly of the Pavilion on the Links. No
thoroughfare passed within three miles of it. The nearest town, and that
was but a fisher village, was at a distance of six or seven. For ten miles
of length, and from a depth varying from three miles to half a mile, this
belt of barren country lay along the sea. The beach, which was the natural
approach, was full of quicksands. Indeed I may say there is hardly a
better place of concealment in the United Kingdom. I determined to pass a
week in the Sea-Wood of Graden Easter, and making a long stage, reached it
about sundown on a wild September day.

The country, I have said, was mixed sand hill and links; _links_ being a
Scottish name for sand which has ceased drifting and become more or less
solidly covered with turf. The pavilion stood on an even space: a little
behind it, the wood began in a hedge of elders huddled together by the
wind; in front, a few tumbled sand hills stood between it and the sea. An
outcropping of rock had formed a bastion for the sand, so that there was
here a promontory in the coast line between two shallow bays; and just
beyond the tides, the rock again cropped out and formed an islet of small
dimensions but strikingly designed. The quicksands were of great extent at
low water, and had an infamous reputation in the country. Close in shore,
between the islet and the promontory, it was said they would swallow a man
in four minutes and a half; but there may have been little ground for this
precision. The district was alive with rabbits, and haunted by gulls which
made a continual piping about the pavilion. On summer days the outlook was