of a mile from the sea, and reached the fringe of the brambles.

"_Now_ we can get straight down through the furze, and never show up
at all," said the tactician. "Beetle, go ahead and explore. Snf! Snf!
Beastly stink of fox somewhere!"

On all fours, save when he clung to his spectacles, Beetle wormed into
the gorse, and presently announced between grunts of pain that he had
found a very fair fox-track. This was well for Beetle, since Stalky
pinched him _a_tergo_. Down that tunnel they crawled. It was
evidently a highway for the inhabitants of the combe; and, to their
inexpressible joy, ended, at the very edge of the cliff, in a few
square feet of dry turf walled and roofed with impenetrable gorse.

"By gum! There isn't a single thing to do except lie down," said
Stalky, returning a knife to his pocket. "Look here!"

He parted the tough stems before him, and it was as a window opened on
a far view of Lundy, and the deep sea sluggishly nosing the pebbles a
couple of hundred feet below. They could hear young jackdaws
squawking on the ledges, the hiss and jabber of a nest of hawks
somewhere out of sight; and, with great deliberation, Stalky spat on
to the back of a young rabbit sunning himself far down where only a
cliff-rabbit could have found foot-hold. Great gray and black gulls
screamed against the jackdaws; the heavy-scented acres of bloom round
them were alive with low-nesting birds, singing or silent as the
shadow of the wheeling hawks passed and returned; and on the naked
turf across the combe rabbits thumped and frolicked.

"Whew! What a place! Talk of natural history; this is it," said