So fascinating are these sand-dunes that one wanders among them for hours, following in the paths worn by the feet of cattle which roam these hills and the neighboring marsh in a half-wild state. Sometimes the banks will shelve abruptly, hollowed out by the wind, and one can look down into a hole ten or twenty feet deep, arched over by thorn-bushes, grapevines and a species of bay. These sand-caverns are of frequent occurrence. There are clumps of scrubby oak completely covered with scarlet honeysuckle and trumpet-flower. While seeking to investigate one of these I startled a hen-quail, which, after whirring rapidly out of sight, returned and manifested much anxiety by plaintive calls. This is a queer place for quail: in the neighborhood of old fields, where they can easily run out and glean a hasty meal from weeds and broken ground, is their chosen place for a nest. Along the surface of the sea long lines of pelicans pursue a lumbering flight; graceful terns (sea-swallows) skim the waves; a great blue heron stalks across the hard sand, majestic, solitary and shy of man's approach; and dainty little beach-birds, piping plover in snowy white and drab, glide rapidly past the surf-line. A mile below Beach Avenue is a high sandhill shelving abruptly toward the beach, half-buried trees projecting from its western slope: it is now known as "Eagle Cliff," so called by the proprietor of Dungeness from the fact of my shooting an eagle there one day in November. In the beach-hammock are the same wind-hollowed hills, rooted into permanence by twisted oaks and magnolias. Upon their limbs in April the Spanish moss and air-plants were just blossoming, the former into little star-like, hardly-discernible flowers, the latter throwing up a green stem with a pink terminal bud, which in August had burst into a spike of crimson flowers. Curious lichens cover the rough trunks of these oaks--some gray, some ashy-white, some pink, some scarlet like blotches of blood. The _Mitchella_, the little partridge-berry, is here in bloom, and has been since the year came in. The marsh that borders the beach-hammock and spreads a sea of silvery green before the mansion is not barren of attractions. Inquisitive and faint-hearted fiddler-crabs are darting in and out of their holes in the mud: an alligator now and then shows a hint of a head above the water of the creek, along whose banks walk daintily and proudly egrets and herons robed in white, and from the reeds of which myriads of water-hens send up a deafening chatter.