us a cordial welcome. The bathing is primitive in the extreme. Harriet possesses two tents, which she pitches daily on a smooth spot of sand. For the use of one in which to disrobe you pay a ridiculously small sum, which also includes old Harriet's watchful 'surveillance' while you are in the water. As the number of tents is so limited and the bathers many, not a few avail themselves of the shelter of a friendly rock behind which to perform their toilet; but I am squeamish, and wait my turn for the tent. And oh! how reviving the plunge into the surf, which comes rolling in frothing and seething like champagne, and which knocks me over and plays at ball with me as if I were a cork! The cool waves curl and cling round me, and kiss my arms and hands lovingly with their wet lips. I let them break over my bowed head, and clasp them tenderly to my breast; but they slip away from me, and riot and tumble round me with joyous laughter, sprinkling eternal freshness from their bounteous hands. I sniff the keen salt air with delight, and let the foam toss me to and fro at its own sweet will, until Harriet, who watches me anxiously (she thinks me a somewhat rash young person, I know), orders me authoritatively to come in, saying I have had enough of it—for the first time. Very reluctantly I obey; but it would require a braver person than I am to contradict the withered old sea-nymph, and soon I emerge from the tent with streaming locks, feeling like a giant refreshed.

Thank goodness, here are no brass bands, no esplanade; a circulating library of such modest pretensions that it does not circulate, and shops in which it is next to impossible to spend any money! At the chemist's we buy our groceries as well as our drugs, and he is the only wine-merchant the dear primitive little place can boast. But we get mutton which transcends Southdown; capital poultry and vegetables; butter such as I have never tasted before or since; rich cream, which you must call Cornish (not 'Devonshire'), to please the buxom farmer's wife who supplies it to you; and plenty of good fruit. And what do you want more, with such a sky above you, such a glorious sea at your feet, such a wall of ironstone crags behind you? Down on the beach we go, and dawdle away the hot summer afternoon. We stretch ourselves on the tawny sand, where great barriers of rock jut out on each side of us, beneath the shadow of a dreadful scarped cliff, to which no scrap of weed or herbage seems able to cling. We look up at it with a sense of awe. We think of the many ships, nearing home after a weary journey, which have been driven by the storm's pitiless whip straight into its terrible arms, there to meet a dread destruction. We think of the many struggling drowning wretches on whom it has gazed down with its stony eyes during all the ages it has stood there. The great billows in their winter's fury have beaten and lashed it until it is scarred all over; but still it gazes calmly down at them, as if defying their malicious rage. And yet, cruel as it is, how picturesque the colouring as it ranges from the intense purple black of the tide-line, through warm green and brown shadows, to the bright high lights far away above our heads.

Dark rock-pools lie behind us, lined with queer zoophytes and delicate sea-anemones; beside us are the crimson lady's finger and the golden trefoil; the dainty scents of the sea-weed and the fresh wet sand are in the air, and before us is the smiling sea. Yes; he smiles at us to-day, though here—with a restless surf breaking eternally on the beach—he is never calm and rippling, as we see him in more southern climes.

Presently the sun sinks lower in the heavens; a breeze awakes, and the day turns cooler; so we go for a walk along the smooth firm sand, which the ebbing sea has left bare; through a wilderness of weird black cliffs, which, when the tide is high, range far out into the sea in castles and turrets and spires of jagged rock; an iron-bound coast indeed, hopeless to the shipwrecked mariner, save for our friendly little haven. Far away on the warm horizon hangs Lundy Island, like a shapely gray ghost; very faint by day, and at night telling us only by its revolving light where it is. We walk on to a gorge up which we can make our way to the top of the cliff, and homeward over the undulating downs and by the banks of golden broom. We pass through a little village, where the myrtles and fuchsias are all abloom in the cottage-gardens, and where the great yews brood silently over the old gray church. The door stands open, and we go in. What a dear old church, with its quaintly carved oaken pews, and tender-hued stained glass windows! Evidently the restoration-fiend has not reached here yet. Let us hope that he will stay away, along with the esplanade and the brass bands.

Sometimes we spend our afternoon or evening out at the end of the breakwater, which forms one side of this little mariner's refuge. It connects a rock which stands right out at sea, with the shore, and occasionally in spring-tides is quite under water. One evening, while standing on the far end watching the glorious setting sun, we forget to look behind us, and turning suddenly, find the breakwater submerged. A man could still cross it perhaps, but a not over-strong woman might easily be carried over and drowned by the on-coming surf. I am not brave enough to face it; so we remain where we are, and enter into conversation with a stalwart Cornishman, who, with the instinct of a true gentleman, volunteers—as the lady seems nervous, and as he knows all about the tides, and exactly how high the sea will rise to-night—to remain with us until we are released by the ebbing waters. I rather resent the imputation of timidity, but am very glad he has imprisoned himself with us, as the night turns darker and darker, and the waves creep higher and higher, and wheel and foam and thunder around, as if in impotent rage at their inability to reach their prey.

Our Cornish hero reassures and consoles me, telling me that they cannot possibly reach to where we sit; and he whiles away the time with stories of wrecks which he has seen, and also of many hair-breadth escapes. He tells us how a ship driving straight on to the cruel rocks, was lifted by one giant wave over the breakwater and 'landed safely in the harbour beyond;' and I steal a glance behind me, and see with thankfulness that the waters are abating. In a little while longer, with the help of our pleasant companion, I am able to get over dry-shod, and it is with a feeling of relief that I find myself once more on mainland.

From this breakwater too, on a stormy day we watch the life-boat go out for practice. How gallantly she breasts the breakers, which seize her and whirl her backwards, as if defying her to leave the shore. The seamen tell us that in the great storms which arise here during the winter she is perfectly useless. No life-boat could live in the seas which beat upon this heartless coast. Often the coast-guardsmen have to creep on hands and knees to their signal-station, as, standing erect, they cannot face the wind. But the rocket apparatus has saved many and many a life; and we also one night see that fiery messenger of life and hope speed away into the darkness over an imaginary wreck; and a fictitious shipwrecked mariner comes on shore in the frail-looking apparatus, which slides along the rope, swaying to and fro in the angry wind, looking like a frail thread, suspended as it is in mid-air over the vexed and tumbling waters below.

Sometimes we make excursions—to Tintagel Castle, where King Arthur dwelt with his knights; or away to wooded Clovelly, where Will Carey lived, and Amyas Leigh suffered, and Rose Salterne loved. Or to Stratton, in the neighbourhood of which a great battle was fought, in 1643, between the Parliamentary and Royalist troops, in which the former, under Waller, were defeated. A cannon found on the field marks the site of the combat; and in the High Street of the town, a slab let into the wall of an old house