and country immediately
adjacent to the coast is level, flat, and bleak; it is only where
the long stretch of dyke-enclosed fields terminates abruptly in a
sheer descent, and the stranger sees the ocean creeping up the sands
far below him, that he is aware on how great an elevation he has
been. Here and there, as I have said, a cleft in the level land
(thus running out into the sea in steep promontories) occurs--what
they would call a 'chine' in the Isle of Wight; but instead of the
soft south wind stealing up the woody ravine, as it does there, the
eastern breeze comes piping shrill and clear along these northern
chasms, keeping the trees that venture to grow on the sides down to
the mere height of scrubby brushwood. The descent to the shore
through these 'bottoms' is in most cases very abrupt, too much so
for a cartway, or even a bridle-path; but people can pass up and
down without difficulty, by the help of a few rude steps hewn here
and there out of the rock.

Sixty or seventy years ago (not to speak of much later times) the
farmers who owned or hired the land which lay directly on the summit
of these cliffs were smugglers to the extent of their power, only
partially checked by the coast-guard distributed, at pretty nearly
equal interspaces of eight miles, all along the north-eastern
seaboard. Still sea-wrack was a good manure, and there was no law
against carrying it up in great osier baskets for the purpose of
tillage, and many a secret thing was lodged in hidden crevices in
the rocks till the farmer sent trusty people down to the shore for a
good supply of sand and seaweed for his land.

One of the farms on the cliff had lately been taken by Sylvia's
father. He was a man who had roamed about a good deal--been sailor,
smuggler, horse-dealer, and farmer in turns; a sort of fellow
possessed by a spirit of adventure and love of change, which did him
and his own family more harm than anybody else. He was just the kind
of man that all his neighbours found fault with, and all his
neighbours liked. Late in life (for such an imprudent man as he, was
one of a class who generally wed, trusting to chance and luck for
the provision for a family), farmer Robson married a woman whose
only want of practical wisdom consisted in taking him for a husband.
She was Philip Hepburn's aunt, and had had the charge of him until
she married from her widowed brother's house. He it was who had let
her know when Haytersbank Farm had been t