One morning, while passing on foot along the coast-wall from Bridlington
to Flambro', on turning my eyes from the sea, I was confronted by a
thing which for a moment or two struck me with the most profound
astonishment. I had come to a mansion, surrounded by trees, three
hundred yards from the cliffs: and there, on a path at the bottom of the
domain, right before me, was a board marked: 'Trespassers will be
Prosecuted.' At once a mad desire--the first which I had had--to laugh,
to roar with laughter, to send wild echoes of merriment clapping among
the chalk gullies, and abroad on the morning air, seized upon me: but I
kept it under, though I could not help smiling at this poor man, with
his little delusion that a part of the earth was his.
Here the cliffs are, I should say, seventy feet high, broken by frequent
slips in the upper stratum of clay, and, as I proceeded, climbing
always, I encountered some rather formidable gullies in the chalk, down
and then up which I had to scramble, till I came to a great mound or
barrier, stretching right across the great promontory, and backed by a
natural ravine, this, no doubt, having been raised as a rampart by some
of those old invading pirate-peoples, who had their hot life-scuffle,
and are done now, like the rest.
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