-white gulls and brown-plumaged boobies. The breeding-place of the
former is within rifle-shot--over there on that long stretch of
banked-up sand on the north side of the bar, where, amid the shelter of
the coarse, tufted grass the delicate, graceful creatures will sit three
months hence on their fragile white and purple-splashed eggs. The
boobies are but visitors, for their breeding-places are on the bleak,
savage islands far to the south, amid the snows and storms of black
Antarctic seas. But here they dwell together, in unison with the gulls,
and were the wind not westerly you could hear their shrill cries and
hoarse croaking as they wheel and eddy and circle above the lonely rock,
on the highest pinnacle of which a great fish-eagle, with neck thrown
back upon his shoulders and eyes fixed eastward to the sun, stands
oblivious of their clamour, as creatures beneath his notice.

Once round the southern side of the Signal Hill the noise of the bar is
lost. Between the hill and the next point--a wild, stern-looking
precipice of black-trap rock--there lies a half a mile or more of
shingly strand, just such as you would see at Pevensey Bay or Deal, but
backed up at high-water mark with piles of drift timber--great dead
trees that have floated from the far northern rivers, their mighty
branches and netted roots bleached white by the sun and wind of many
years, and smelling sweet of the salty sea air. Mingled with the lighter
bits of driftwood and heaps of seaweed are the shells of hundreds of
crayfish--some of the largest are newly cast up by the sea, and the
carapace is yellow and blue; others are burnt red by exposure to the
sun; while almost at every step you crush into the thin backs and
armoured tails of young ones about a foot in length, the flesh of which,
by some mysterious process of nature, has vanished, leaving the skin,
muscles, and beautiful fan-like tail just as fresh as if the crustaceans
were alive. Just here, out among those kelp-covered rocks, you may, on a
moonlight night, catch as many crayfish as you wish--three of them will
be as much as any one would care to carry a mile, for a large,
full-grown "lobster," as they are called locally, will weigh a good ten
pounds.

Once round the precipice we come to a new phase of coastal scenery. From
the high land above us green scrub-covered spur after spur shoots
downward to the shore, enclosing numerous little beaches of coarse sand
and many coloured spiral shel