We come over the dry, sweet-smelling grass to the cliff edge on a fresh morning, with a deep blue sky overhead and a sea below of ultramarine broken up with an infinitude of surfaces reflecting scraps of the cliffs and the few white clouds. Falling on our knees, we look straight downwards into a cove full of blue shade; but so bright is the surrounding light that every detail is microscopically clear. The crumpling and distortion of the successive layers of chalk can be seen with such ease that we might be looking at a geological textbook. On the ledges, too, can be seen rows of little white-breasted puffins; razor-bills are perched here and there, as well as countless guillemots. The ringed or bridled guillemot also breeds on the cliffs, and a number of other types of northern sea-birds are periodically noticed along these inaccessible Bempton Cliffs. The guillemot makes no nest, merely laying a single egg on a ledge. If it is taken away by those who plunder the cliffs at the risk of their lives, the bird lays another egg, and if that disappears, perhaps even a third. The innumerable varieties in the eggs make the gathering of them for collectors very profitable. Unwelcome as this annual robbing of the eggs may be, yet to watch a man being lowered over the cliff by what appears to be a mere thread, and to see him suspended over the restless waves, is a thrilling sight. The great promontory of Flamborough, though in many ways claiming a high position in the list of England’s places of natural beauty, suffers much from being popular. In the season, I am told--for I have always visited Flamborough in spring or autumn--the road from the station to the lighthouse is often _crowded_, and I have not the smallest doubt that this is true from the appearance of the roads, the village, and even the North Landing, for on the occasion of my first visit, in the early spring, I was painfully impressed with the feeling that everything bore the tired, unsatisfactory appearance of a place infested with excursionists. The edges of the paths had a look of being overworn and overtrodden; fences, gates, and the like were too much carved with foolish initials, and everywhere I glanced I found the distressing scraps of old newspaper, the grocer’s paper-bag long rifled of its contents, and the coloured cardboard box that once enclosed tablets of chocolate. It is quite as much a desecration to litter with scraps of dirty paper a noble cape, whose whole aspect is otherwise just as the hand of Time has left it, as to drop sandwich-papers on the floor of some venerable minster, and hope that the result will not be painful to the next who enters the building.