No sooner was it dark than all were in bed and asleep; not one square path of yellow light was visible. To enjoy the sensation I went out and sat down, and listened alone to the liquid rippling, warbling sound of the swift-flowing streamlet--that sweet low music of running water to which the reed-warbler had listened thousands of years ago, striving to imitate it, until his running rippling song was perfect. A fresh surprise and pleasure awaited me when I explored the coast east of the village; it was bold and precipitous in places, and from the summit of the cliff a very fine view of the coast-line on either hand could be obtained. Best of all, the face of the cliff itself was the breeding-place of some hundreds of herring-gulls. The eggs at the period of my visit were not yet hatched, but highly incubated, and at that stage both parents are almost constantly at home, as if in a state of anxious suspense. I had seen a good many colonies of this gull before at various breeding stations on the coast--south, west, and east--but never in conditions so singularly favourable as at this spot. From the vale where the Branscombe pours its clear waters through rough masses of shingle into the sea the ground to the east rises steeply to a height of nearly five hundred feet; the cliff is thus not nearly so high as many another, but it has features of peculiar interest. Here, in some former time, there has been a landslip, a large portion of the cliff at its highest part falling below and forming a sloping mass a chalky soil mingled with huge fragments of rock, which lies like a buttress against the vertical precipice and seems to lend it support. The fall must have occurred a very long time back, as the vegetation that overspreads the rude slope--hawthorn, furze, and ivy--has an ancient look. Here are huge masses of rock standing isolated, that resemble in their forms ruined castles, towers, and churches, some of them completely overgrown with ivy. On this rough slope, under the shelter of the cliff, with the sea at its feet, the villagers have formed their cultivated patches. The patches, wildly irregular in form, some on such steeply sloping ground as to suggest the idea that they must have been cultivated on all fours, are divided from each other by ridges and by masses of rock, deep fissures in the earth, strips of bramble and thorn and furze bushes. Altogether the effect was very singular the huge rough mass of jumbled rock and soil, the ruin wrought by Nature in one of her Cromwellian moods, and, scattered irregularly about its surface, the plots or patches of cultivated smoothness--potato rows, green parallel lines ruled on a grey ground, and big, blue-green, equidistant cabbage-globes--each plot with its fringe of spike-like onion leaves, crinkled parsley, and other garden herbs. Here the villagers came by a narrow, steep, and difficult path they had made, to dig in their plots;