g of wings from far overhead, as a flock of birds flew
on through the darkness of the night, following the wonderful instinct
which made them take flight to other lands.

"Wasn't geese; and I don't think it was ducks," said the lad to himself,
as he slung his darkened lanthorns together, and began to descend as
coolly as if he had been provided by nature with wings to guard him
against a fall down the cliff.

"Wonder whether they saw the lights," he said to himself. "Not much
good showing them, if they were in the fog."

He went on, gradually approaching the mist which lay below him, and at
last was descending the zigzag path with the stars blotted out, and the
tiny drops of moisture gathering on his eyelashes, finding his way more
by instinct than sight.

"Come in with the tide 'bout 'leven," said Ram, as he still descended
the face of the cliff, then the path, and at last was well down in the
little valley, whose mouth seemed to have been filled up in some
convulsion of nature by a huge wall of cliff, under which the streamlet
which ran from the hills had mined its way.

As soon as he was down on level ground, the boy started for home at a
trot, gave the lanthorns into his mother's hands, and, after a brief
inquiry as to his father's whereabouts, he started off once more.

The part of the cliff for which he made was exactly opposite Sir
Risdon's old house, and to a stranger about the last place where it
would be deemed possible for a smuggler to land his cargo.

Hence the successful landing of many a boat-load, which had been
scattered the country through.

For there, at the foot of the cliff, lay a natural platform or pier,
almost as level as if it had been formed for a landing stage. The deep
water came right up to its edge, and here, at a chosen time of tide, a
lugger could lie close in, and her busy crew and their helpmates land
keg and bale upon the huge ledge,--a floor of intensely hard stone, full
of great ammonites, many a couple of feet across, monsters of
shell-fish, which had gradually settled down and died, when the stone in
which they lay had been soft mud.

Revenue boats had of course, from time to time, as they explored the
coast, noted this natural landing-place, but as there was only a broad
step twenty feet above this to form another platform, and then the
cliffs ran straight up two hundred feet slightly inclined over toward
the sea, and the existence of even a moderate surf would have me