Up at Clewer signal station, where the coastguard, outside his tiny whitewashed hut, does incomprehensible things with strings of flags, the wild growths of these downs run riot, kept in subjection only by the winds, which have imposed the oddest shapes upon them. The gorse-bushes have been buffeted by them into closely compacted hummocky figures, the heather is disposed in hemispherical groups, the brambles, turn in upon themselves in a way the free-born hedgerow bramble would despise, and only the bracken, which is a summer growth and, like the grass of the field, here to-day and gone to-morrow, is independent and upstanding. The beautiful bracken! Come here in July, and you will think all the strawberries in the world are on t’other side of the next shoulder of hill; for in that month the bracken has a perfume like that of the ripest and choicest and sweetest strawberries ever grown. There are rabbits on these uplands, as with a painful wrench of the ankle you are not unlikely to discover, when your foot plunges unexpectedly into one of their burrows. There are moles, too, evidently, and slow-worms wriggle plentifully across the path. And thus, now up, now down and around, with the perspiration streaming from you in the still, close hollows, and drying off on the breezy heights, you come by astonishing rocks down to a little sandy rock-girt cove, solitary, without even a Man Friday’s footprints on the yellow sand, through which a little stream trickles. But though no human footprint may be seen, the sands are patterned by the thousand with the broad-arrow prints of the gulls’ feet, as though the War Office had descended upon the place and thus prodigally marked it for its ownest own. One could and two could even better—go a-Robinson-Crusoeing here very comfortably for awhile in the summer, with the aid of a tent, despite the unlovely name of the place, which is Sewer Mill Cove. What’s in a name? Not much here, at any rate, for it has really nothing to do with drains. There are several “sewer” farms in the neighbourhood, east and west, and the district in general is called “The Sewers”: the name deriving from the Anglo-Saxon description of the folk living here, the “Sæware,” the sea-folk, as distinguished from those who, living a little more inland, obtained their livelihood from the land. The process by which the place took its name is not an unusual one; and Canterbury—the “burgh of the Kent-ware,” or Kentish folk—may be taken as a prominent and familiar instance. Sewer Mill Cove was the scene in 1885 of one of the many wrecks that have made this coast dreaded by mariners, for then the _Hallowe’en_ teaship was cast away here, fortunately without loss of life.