me; of Melligan and Carregan,
the one favoured by shags, the other by razor-bills and guillemots. And
so talking, while they wondered, she brought them across the hill to
the great headland.

Merriman's Head, in truth, is itself an islet, being cut off from
Brefar by a channel, scarcely eight feet wide, through which the seas
rush darkly with horrible gurglings. The cleft goes down sheer, and was
cut, they say, with one stroke of a giant's sword. Beyond it the
headland rises grim and stark--a very Gibraltar of the birds, that
roost in regiments on its giddy ledges.

As the children came down to the brink a flock of white gulls seemed to
drop from the rock, hung in the air for a moment, and began wheeling
overhead in wide circles, uttering their strange cries. A score of
little oyster-catchers, too, tucked up their scarlet legs and skimmed
off in flight. But the majority kept their posts and looked down almost
disdainfully.

"They know we can't get to them," said Matthew Henry. "But wait till I
am grown up! Then I'll come over to Brefar and build a bridge."

"You will not need a bridge when you are grown up," said Vashti. "See!"
She stepped back a pace or two, and the children, before they guessed
her purpose, saw her flash past them and leap. She cleared the chasm,
easily alighted, and stood smiling back at them, while the birds poured
out from their ledges, cloud upon cloud of them. Their wings darkened
the air. Their uproar beat from cliff to cliff, and back again in
broken echoes, like waves caught in a narrow cave and rebounding.
Vashti looked up and laughed. Like a witch she stood, waving her arms
to them.

"It is easy," she called back to the children; "easy enough, if you
don't let the water frighten you. Why, Annet could jump it if she
dared. Annet ... but no, child! go back!"

But Annet, with a quick glance at her, and another at the water
swirling below, had set her teeth and stepped back half-a-dozen paces.
She would follow this woman, witch or no witch.

Linnet cried, too, and Matthew Henry. Vashti, stretching out both hands
to wave back the child, opened them suddenly to catch her--and not too
soon, for Annet alighted on a rock that sloped back towards the gulf,
and had measured her powers against the leap so narrowly that her heels
overhung the water and her body was bending backward when Vashti
gripped, and, dragging her up to firm ground, took her in both arms.

"But why? Why, Annet?"

"I don