Hick: A Ramble in the Isle of Lindisfarne. 21% 
would not come to him. So he climbed the hill on one side, 
whilst they, forewarned by their sentries on the hill-top, quietly 
walked down the other. Since then they have been left undis- 
turbed in their eerie. 
s the tide was ebbing I crossed over the wet stones to 
St. Cuthbert’s Isle. It is very small, only a few rocks with 
plants scattered here and there, and the remains of an ordinary 
nineteenth-century building. I secured some plants of what 
is called locally Lavender, by aid of a knife, from a crevice 
in the rocks, and some plants of the Cochlearia officinalis, 
though neither were in flower at the time. I next visited the 
mussel gardens, which are dotted over the shore. The mussels, 
' having come from deep beds originally, I found to my delight 
some fine specimens of Sertudarida adhering to their shells. _ It 
is rather serious, I think, this gradual extinction on our English 
coasts of the mussels, which form one of the chief baits of the 
fishermen. Mussels seem to love a quiet, undisturbed life, and 
the rush of our modern civilisation is fatal to them. I wandered 
to the cliffs; they are mostly. shale and easily crumble away, 
and the shore is strewn with red bomb-like stones and 
St. Anne’s marble, which looks as if groups of worms coming 
Out of their holes had suddenly been changed into stone. 
I looked for the fossil Encrinites which St. Cuthbert fashions in 
the bowels of the earth, according to the legend, but which 
matter-of-fact people BAY. “are the fossil stalks of the ‘stone 
lilies’ or ‘feather stars’ which lived thousands of years ago in 
the ocean forests. My search, except for a nest of beetles, 
which had crept into the rock for shelter, was profitless, so 
I tried the shore. The search for St. Cuthbert’s beads is by no 
means a sinecure. . Nothing but the hope of ‘breaking the 
for two hours lying face downwards on the shore, turning over 
the stones and looking in the little pools. Sometimes I knelt 
on an inviting stone and it gave way, and I was precipitated 
into the water left by the receding tide. So by the time I had 
secured a few Encrinites, and several small fossil ele. and 
some fossils which I did not know, perhaps the base of the 
‘stone lily,’ I was very wet; and I ate my lunch on a rock and 
felt it was not quite such a beautiful day as I had thought. 
However, if I ished to get to Emmanuel Point before 
Campion. Peter was on the beach, tidying up his boat, and 
July 1898, 
