d her cheeks too much tanned by rude health, and by exposure to the
sun as the village gossips said, I, Henry Kinnish, poetic dreamer, and
amateur sculptor, thought she had a symmetry of form and a grace of
movement which wrought her whole being into harmony and made her a
perfect example of beauty with a plain face; and every one knew that
Andrew, the young village blacksmith and rural postman, loved her with
all the might of his big, brawny soul.

These two ideas of Deborah's beauty and Andrew's love for her, were
revealed to me one day when, with Deborah's master, his lumbering sons
and comely daughters, and my chum Fred Harcourt, an artist from "across
the water," we were cutting some early grass in May, just before the
full bloom of the gorse had begun to fade from the hillsides and from
the tops of the hedges where it had made borders of gold for the green
of the fields all the spring.

A soft west wind, which blew in from the sea, made waves along the uncut
grass to windward of the mowers, and played around the skirts of
Deborah, making them flutter about her, while the exertion of the
haymaking occasionally let loose her long, strong black hair.

But the face of Deborah was sad; for the village policeman had laid a
charge against her before his chief to make her account for her
possession of a large number of seagulls' eggs, to take which the law of
the Island had made a punishable offence, by an act of Tynwald passed to
protect the sea fowl from extinction.

The eggs, all fresh, and newly taken from the nests, had been found on
Deborah's dressing-table; but Deborah indignantly denied all knowledge
of the means by which they had got there. There was a mystery about it
to every one, for fresh clutches were seen there every morning, and the
innocent Deborah made no attempt to conceal them. Where, then, could
they come from but from some nests of the colony of seagulls which lived
in the haughs that dropped down into the sea from Rhaby Hills? But no
woman, young or old, could climb the craigs where the gulls had their
nests. It was a feat of daring only performed by reckless boys and young
men who were reared on the littoral, and who were strong and spirited
craigsmen by inheritance and by familiarity with the dangerous sport of
egg-collecting among the giddy heights of precipices on which, if they
took but one false step, they might be hurled to certain destruction
below.

When the mowers had made all but the