Now I have crossed a channel of the sea, and have looked upon the mighty three-deckers, and all the flower of the yachtery of England; and I have strolled through a smart modern town, and have passed a meditative half-hour in a very ancient village, and then, at a sharp turn, I have quitted the high-road, with its hot milestones, and picked my way through a blossoming lane where the nightingales were singing; and I have scrambled over the edge of a snipe-bog, and hurried past the mouth of a diluvian estuary, and here I am, stretched at full length on the choicest bit of beach in all the realm of Queen Victoria. In front of me are soaring pinnacles of chalk, ribbed and dotted with primeval flints, like the gun-muzzles in an upper deck. Behind me rises another barrier, formed of the dark “greensand;” and on one side, for the space of a mile, these lofty brows have dipped and disappeared, that the red edge of the wealden might crop out from a wide tract of rush-grown water-meadows. Through the heart of these latter steals a rivulet, beloved of stray wild-fowl, but not tenanted by anything so lively as a trout. The position of this beach is all that can be desired, and its contents will not disappoint expectation. It has sometimes reminded me of one of those angular nooks formed externally by the converging hedges of a cover and a crop, where you are sure to meet with the hares and pheasants which have come out to feed on your wheat-stubble or turnips. Here, however, instead of the scuttling game, you must look for matchless pebbles. Often as I have paced this charming strand, the occasion of my first stepping upon it was pure accident, as, indeed, are some of the pleasantest turns in life. I remember one summer’s day, when the solid cliffs seemed to be pulverizing under the heat, and the air-vessels in exposed sheaves of bladderwrack were splitting and popping like crackers, I found four or five specimens within a couple of hundred yards which I have never since surpassed, seldom equalled. Two of these were _deep red_ choanites, conveying the idea, not of dull “oxide,” but that the animal’s blood had suffused the agate; another was a particoloured madrepore, another, a moss-jasper. This bay, however, possesses peculiar advantages. In addition to the fossils which drop from time to time out of its own overhanging cliffs, it is fed in a remarkable manner from other sources. * * * * * Until of late years, Sussex has been the usual resort of those who desired to collect pebbles for the cabinet. The capabilities of this coast vary with every twenty miles. The Brighton beach was once famous for the supply of “landscape-pebbles;” but in the lapse of years its fecundity has been sadly impaired. The best chance remaining now is that of an occasional waif during the March winds on the sweep fronting Brunswick Terrace, and for about half a mile toward Shoreham.