On the smooth turf the dried ware is piled in conical heaps, like giant molehills, to preserve it from the heavy night dews and from possible rain, and among the brown hillocks the wheatear bobs up and down, flirting his tail and repeating his cheerful “Tchk! tchk! chek-o! chek-o!” At times the rapture of summer and of his love inspire him with a vain desire of song. Up he goes, as if he were in very deed the skylark he takes as his model, uttering harsh and unmelodious notes—a feeble travesty of the golden rain of song that falls from the blue above him. But his flight extends upwards only a yard or two, and he sinks down again, chuckling to himself, as pleased with his song as any minor poet. As the day wears down to afternoon the corncrakes begin to call from the young grass, and all night long they answer each other from field to field. Speak of them to the kelpers, and everywhere one hears the same story of their hibernation in old walls. That landrails migrate has been proved beyond question, but equally beyond question does it seem that some few sleep out the winter here. Any kelper will tell how he, or if not he himself then some one of his neighbours, once in winter found a corncrake in some old dyke, to all appearance dead. He carried it home, and, laying it before the fire, watched the death-like trance slowly melt into life and motion. As to the winter sleep I can only speak at second-hand; but I have seen the birds in summer run like rats into the dry-stone dykes with which our crofters so love to encumber and adorn their land. That these dykes can be meant only for ornament is evident to the most casual observer in this land where ponies, cows, sheep, ay, and the very geese, are ofttimes tethered by the leg. Yet if the dykes serve no other purpose, they provide nesting-places for the starling and the wheatear, for the rock-pipit and the sparrow, which save the crops of the crofter from destruction by grub and fly. Mice also shelter in them, and rats in those islands where rats are found. In the happy isle of which I write no rat can live. They come ashore time and again from vessels touching at the little pier near the village, but where they go or what fate awaits them none can tell—only this, that they are seen no more on the green lap of the world. But we have left the ware too long in the sun. Should rain come, the kelper sees much of his profit melt away, for the salt which it causes to crystallize on the dried weed wastes, and what is left makes inferior kelp. All along the edges of the drying-greens are the burning pits or kilns—hollows for all the world like huge plovers’ nests in shape, lined with flat blue stones from the beach. They are about two feet deep and some five feet in diameter.