"Ye-es, but just a trifle spooky," admitted Merle. "Honestly I shouldn't like to spend a night up here camping out in this shanty. I'd be scared to death of the mound dwellers. What are we to do with our prehistoric cups, Bevis? Leave them here or take them back?" It was decided to wash the cups in a pool of water close by, and leave them inside the hut to be ready for some future picnic. That domestic duty finished, the Triumvirate wended their way back in the direction of Chagmouth. This time they climbed by a pathway down the cliffs on to the beach, in order to go home along the shore. It was low tide, so they could walk on the firm sands at the edge of the high-water mark. Little gentle waves were rippling in over the rocks, cormorants were diving for fish, and the inevitable seagulls were wheeling and screaming, or settling down in the pools to hunt for tit-bits. At the corner of the cove, built on the solid rock barely above the level of winter storms, stood the little old, old church of St. Gervan's, disused now, except for an annual service. Before the building of Chagmouth church in the eighteenth century it had served a wide district, and there were tales that its bell had often proved a signal for ships in a fog, and had warned them off the rocks. There were other and wilder stories, of smugglers who had hidden their contraband goods inside the pews, of the press-gang who had waylaid the fishermen as they returned from service and had carried them off to serve in His Majesty's navy, and of a wicked parson, foremost among a gang of wreckers, whose uneasy ghost still haunted the beach on moonlight nights.