The mines have long been deserted. But here and there among the villages you still may happen on some son of the soil, some time-worn and bent and wrinkled patriarch, who, in his young days, dug for ore among these hills; who remembers the time when a miner, working here for his own hand, could earn a sovereign a day. But although the miners have been gone these fifty years, the whole country side is seamed and scarred with traces of their old workings. There are fields on this farm where the ground is so broken with heaps of rubbish from the pits, and so full of barely-covered shafts, that the land is almost valueless. But there are no buildings to spoil the landscape. There was no machinery but the windlass and the bucket. And here, as ever, Nature has done her best to hide the traces of man's ravages. The heaps of stone and earth she has changed to grassy knolls, covered them with lotus and burnet and scented clusters of the thyme, and scattered over them little clumps of dark campanula. Under her kindly touch the stony shafts are turned to bowery hollows, green with moss and stone-crop, and long plumes of fern.

A bird-haunted spot is this little hollow in the hills. The clump of old Scotch firs looking down from the hill-slope yonder is the harbour of crow and magpie, ever the hangers-on of a West Country farm. The straggling hedge-rows that part these broad fields are full of empty nests. Here, among the red fruit of rowan and whitebeam, the ring-ousel lingers on his southward journey. In this old apple tree, whose withered arms are hung for once with fruit, like little golden balls, is a woodpecker's hole, with marks of the maker's tool about it yet. That stately oak tree, springing straight and tall in the line of the old hedge-row—touched above with a hundred points of light where the pale green acorns hang, and laced below, across its drooping branches, with silver lines of gossamer—is a resting place for all the birds of the air. In the spring the cuckoo alights upon its topmost crown and calls his name to all the neighbourhood. From its leafy crest the magpie looks down, meditating another raid upon the hencoop. The brown squirrels too, love to frolic in its dim green shadows, playing hide and seek among the branches, and racing headlong down its wrinkled bark to scamper over the short turf of the meadow. At this moment two linnets on its topmost spray are filling the air with such a chorus of sweet notes and breezy chattering that you might think a score of birds were in the tree.

The sun is sinking low. The shadows of the hedge-row elms are stealing far down the grassy slope. Sparrows that have been gleaning in outlying stubble-fields are flying home to roost in the ivy on the old barn wall, or in the sides of the stacks, or in snug tunnels that they have made for themselves in the thatched roof of their thankless lord and suzerain:—quarters infinitely cleaner and sweeter and more wholesome altogether than those of their smoke-blackened cousins in the city. The sun is down. A soft blue mist is gathering in the red heart of the pines. And now

The heat-glimmer is still quivering on the sand, and over the vast mud-flats, bared by the retreating tide, a soft haze hangs. Yet the sun, sinking slowly through a cloudless sky, reddens as it nears the low horizon, and the grey grass of the old sea wall is brightening in the glow of sunset. Over the long curve of the sand-hills shows a wide sweep of plain, whose level meadows, freshened by the welcome rain, are still a very blaze of gold. Against the sky, where, at the far limit of the bay, the ragged hillocks die away into the shore, stands the white shaft of a lighthouse. Farther still, across the hazy mud-flats, rise the faint shapes of shadowy hills. The tide is out. A sea of boulders, shaggy with dark weed, look like a herd of strange monsters come ashore to bask upon the sand. There is no sign of human presence anywhere, save a house roof just showing here and there above the sand-hills, the distant hamlets scattered at far intervals over the moor, and the black stakes of fishing nets that stand out on the grey mud like webs of giant spiders. There is no figure on the shore, no stranded boat, no idle sail. Nor is there sound, save the low monotonous murmur of the sea. But here and there over the desolate expanse dark shapes of birds are moving. Now and then a troop of dunlins careers along the sand. Surely they are soon back after their brief northern summer. One can hardly think that they and the brown whimbrels whose musical trill at times falls softly on the ear can have been away at all. Now a party of gulls get up with wild stormy crying, and wheel and eddy in the air, now light, now dark on the grey sky of the horizon. All the while to the cliff ledges overhead clamorous daws are drifting, passing to their nests, or settling on storm-worn pinnacles of rock. That shrill pipe was the cry of a kestrel. Two rock doves hurrying homeward, cliff-dwellers like the rest, pay no heed. They know him well, too well to fear at any time his beak or claw. Here he comes, wheeling round the headland. With wings and tail spread wide, he pauses a moment to hover in the air; then sails slowly by. No shrill clamour from the cliff answers his challenge. No fierce young eyases yet are on the watch for his return. He alights on a ledge far overhead, where his mate no doubt is brooding on her rich brown eggs. Over the sea, trembling in the sinking sun, lies a gleam as of frosted silver. Suddenly, far out on the grey level, breaks a line of light. A faint sound falls on the ear—the low roar of the returning sea, the first wave of the rising tide. Now troops of daws, rising from the fields along the shore, fly homeward—a gathering cloud of dusky figures sweeping towards the cliff, that echoes with their musical clamour.

Right overhead they go, clustering like bees on ledges and pinnacles and grassy slopes, and settle down to gossip over the experiences of the day. Again they rise into the air, and wheel over the sea, and again turn homeward, darkening the cliff as with innumerable points of shadow. Once more they rise in eddying crowd. The troop divides. With sharp chorus of farewell one party flies straight over the hill. Their resting-place is farther on. They are not dwellers in the cliff. They are making for the low hills to the northward, a ridge of limestone dwindling into such another rocky headland. There, in the shelter of the hills, stand the ruins of a priory, in the niches of whose crumbling tower, or on the dusty floor of its neglected belfry, their sires and they have built for generations their untidy nests. It is an ancient pile. Founded now nearly seven centuries ago, its grey walls harboured for three hundred years a handful of monks, black-stoled, black-hooded, darker even than these daws. It has long been an article of faith in the countryside that the old tower was

But in the original letter, still to be read in the Cottonian library, in which William de Curtenai, grandson of Traci, made known to the Bishop of the diocese his intention of founding a "monastic house of the order of monks of St. Augustine," there is no hint at all of expiation. Nor, indeed, have we any evidence that the guilt of murder ever did lie heavy on de Traci's soul: though there is an old tradition that, after a brief reappearance at Court, he spent the remainder of his stormy life in seclusion on his manor near Morthoe, where in the old churchyard by the sea

The founder of the priory seems to have had no other object in view than "the welfare of the soul of Robert de Curtenai, my father, … and of my mother and myself; also of my wife, my ancestors and descendants." For rather more than three centuries the "Worspryng" canons, never probably more than ten in number, lived and died in this grey old house by the sea. We know little of their story; but the document is still in existence to which the last of their priors set his name in acknowledgment that the Pope was a usurper, and that King Henry alone was true head of the Church. Two years later all the minor monasteries were forfeited to the Crown—"forasmoche as manifest synne, vicious, carnall and abomynable lyving is dayly used and comitted amonges the lytell Abbeys and Pryories." This was one of the "lytell Pryories." Its revenues from all sources, whether from rents that were reckoned in horseshoes, or from "arable at ivd.," or from "wode and waste at jd. the acre," amounted to rather under a hundred a year.

When the little party of friars turned their backs upon their home, they appear to have carried with them what was probably the most sacred of their relics: one of those small wooden cups which, filled with "Canterbury Water"—that is, with water containing a minute quantity of the martyr's blood—were sold to visitors at Becket's shrine. Marvellous are the tales related by the chroniclers of the time as to the virtue of this wonderful water. By its use sight, hearing, speech, reason, and even life were restored.

The pavement was in fact still sprinkled with his blood when those supernatural manifestations began, which were to make the martyr's shrine the richest in the world. On the very day of the murder, a blind man on his way to seek aid at the church of St. Nicholas, was accosted by "an appearance in the form of a man, who warned him to betake himself to the new martyr of Christ." He groped his way to Becket's body. He touched his own sightless eyes with the sacred blood, and his vision was immediately restored. This was the first of many miracles. The pious chroniclers record how men, women, and children flocked to the shrine from every corner of the Kingdom, some to ask aid, others to return thanks for favours granted: as Chaucer puts it:

Captives, who had been taken by the Saracens, travelled all the way from Damascus, to return thanks at the shrine of Canterbury, because St. Thomas had appeared to them in the visions of the night and helped them to escape.

Five writers of the time did their best to record for the benefit of future ages the miracles of the blessed martyr. These were Benedict, sometime Prior of Christchurch, Canterbury, and afterwards Abbot of Peterborough; William of Canterbury, who, perhaps, held office at the shrine after Benedict; Alan, Abbot of Tewkesbury; John of Salisbury, who witnessed the murder, and whom de Traci thought was the man he had wounded; and Grim of Cambridge,—not a monk, in all probability, nor really connected in any way with Becket, but his great admirer. It was Grim, it will be remembered, who was wounded in the vain attempt to save the Archbishop. The minutest particulars are given in these chronicles. The names and professions, the counties, the native towns of many of the pilgrims are recorded.

There are exceptions. In the case of a man who came from "the province of Surrey," Benedict says "the barbarous name of the town has not stuck in my memory." The miracles were of every imaginable description. A sick monk, near Sedan, too ill to leave his cell, was touched with a mere list of the Saint's achievements, and in a short time he was able to resume his duties. A monk of Byland was dying. He had already received the Viaticum, when the Abbot, having made the sign of the Cross in water upon a piece of Becket's hair-shirt, caused the dying man's mouth to be opened, and the water administered. Instantly, we are told, the sick man recovered speech and appetite. It was a common thing to promise a candle to the Saint. There were men who were too ill to go in person to Canterbury, and who dated their recovery from the instant that the candle was lighted for them at the shrine.

There is a description of five widows who tried in vain to restore life to a child who had been three hours under water. They held him up by the feet; they repeated nine Paternosters over him in the name of the blessed St. Thomas, but all with no effect. Then one of them said to the child's mother: "Run and fetch a piece of string and measure the child, and promise to the martyr a candle of the same length." It was done, and the boy at once recovered.

The smallest offerings were not disdained. A Flemish bird-catcher, having tried in vain for some days to trap a certain falcon, cried out, "O Blessed Thomas, glorious martyr, I will give thee a penny if thou wilt give me the falcon." Benedict tells us that "it came instantly to the bird-catcher, as if used to his hand. We both saw the falcon," he goes on, "and received the money."

Even more marvellous still are the legends that passed current as to the wonders wrought by the martyr's blood, which in quantities about the bulk of a hazel nut, and largely diluted, were sold to pilgrims under the name of Canterbury Water. A man, journeying home after visiting the shrine, was belated at Rochester. In vain he sought shelter for the night. At door after door he was refused admittance. At last, "for the sake of the blessed martyr," he was taken in. In the night the town caught fire. When the citizens were fleeing, panic-stricken, "the pilgrim, whose faith was more fervent than the material flame, remaining boldly on the roof, called for a spear, or something long. A fork (hayfork, perhaps) was handed up to him. Then, taking the reliquary (containing Canterbury Water) from his neck … he fastened it to the fork, held it out towards the fire," and thus kept the flames at bay. For "the fire, as if fearing a contrary element, turned aside." Finally the whole town was burnt, with the single exception of its one hospitable house.

A few drops of Canterbury Water swallowed or administered externally sufficed to cure the most desperate diseases, and were quite as efficacious as the pilgrimage itself. By its use the blind, the deaf, the lame, the palsied, were cured, and even the dead brought back to life.

The precious liquid was sold at first in small wooden vessels, fitted with lids, in which mirrors were sometimes fixed, "specula mulierum," as the monkish writer puts it. But as the wood was apt to split, flasks of lead or earthenware were used instead. These were hung from the neck, and came to be regarded, like the palm branch of Jerusalem or the escalop shell of Compostella, as an emblem of the pilgrimage. It was not an uncommon practice, in old days, to place in a martyr's tomb a small vessel filled with his blood. Many such have been discovered in the Catacombs. In the Kircher Museum at Rome there is an agate cup, containing the remains of blood, which was found in the Catacombs of St. Callixtus.

A special point of interest attaches to these legends in that there is reason to think that one of these very reliquaries, one of the earliest and most primitive form and still actually containing traces of blood, has been preserved to the present day. Forty years ago, or rather more—the actual date was 1849—some workmen, while repairing the interior of a little West Country church, at Kewstoke in Somersetshire, had occasion to remove an old carved stone, which had been built into the masonry. It was apparently the head of a column, worked in Caen stone, a material not used elsewhere in the building, and the style was earlier than anything else in the church.

In front of this capital is a niche enclosing a battered effigy, apparently the half length figure of a veiled woman. At the back, where it was embedded in the wall, is an arched cavity, about eight inches high, closed by an oaken panel, and containing a small cylindrical wooden vessel, three inches in diameter, and but slightly more in height, broken and decayed, and containing at the bottom a layer of some dark substance, pronounced, after careful examination, to be the remains of blood. It is a bold guess, but still a guess that has much to support it, that this cup was one of the very reliquaries dispersed through the country after Becket's martyrdom; that it once held no less precious a relic than "Canterbury Water"; in short, that the dark layer at the bottom is what passed, seven centuries ago, for the blood of the blessed St. Thomas himself.

The monastery is now a dwelling-house. The windows of a modern farm look out through the walled-up arches of the priory. Quaint gargoyles peer through the mantling creepers of the ruined cloister. Grey stems of ivy have sapped right through the crumbling masonry. Wallflowers bloom on the worn crowns of the turrets. It is a quiet spot, "here, at the farthest limit of the world." Yet it is not strange that a corner so remote should have been chosen for the site of a monastery dedicated "to God, the blessed Mary, and the blessed Martyr Thomas." All four of Becket's murderers were men of the West Country.

De Brito and Fitzurse were landowners of this district; De Traci and De Morville belonged, at farthest, to the neighbouring county. This crumbling relic is to us but an item on the shelf of a museum. The great churchman himself is to most of us nothing but a name, a mere figure in a page of history. And although poet and player, past and present masters of their art, have done their best to bring him again before the world; although his counterfeit presentment stands to-day before us as full of fire, of valour, of resolute determination as on that fatal Tuesday more than seven centuries ago—yet the Becket of the players is but "a fable, a phantom, a show." When the curtain falls upon that last sad scene, we are conscious of no sinking of heart at the remembrance of an awful figure lying white and still upon the bloodstained pavement. The curtain down, our Becket is alive again. The actor lives, the martyr is forgotten.

There is another figure in the play whose memory lingers in this far-off spot. At the foot of the low blue hills yonder lies the village which was the ancient home of the Cliffords.

Rosamund herself,—the fair girl over whose tomb at Godstow her royal lover wrote—

was born almost within sight of Curtenai's tower. When the fair fugitive pleaded, in excuse for wandering out unguarded, that

she was, it may be, thinking of the hamlet where, in quiet cloisters, long since gone to ruin, she passed her girlish days. There by the

there may have come to her in vision some glimmer of the coming time, some forerunning shadow of the

A grey November day, with sad-coloured clouds hanging low over a grey and sullen sea. At intervals there rolls across the water the dull boom of distant fog-guns, echoing like thunder under the heavy veil of mist. From the shore below comes the ceaseless fret of waves sweeping swiftly in across the sand. Along the edge of the tide and over the wide mud-flats are scattered the white figures of gulls; and at times there comes faintly up the low musical call of a whimbrel, or the plaintive wail of a curlew. At times, too, there rises in the air a great flock of sandpipers, like a thin smoke-cloud drifting down the shore, until, as they wheel, their snowy breasts and upturned wings gleam for a moment silver white on the grey sky behind them.

It is a grey world altogether; grey sea, grey shore, grey shingle. Grey, too, are the ragged sand hills, whose shifting ramparts the gales of many winters have piled so high over the old sea wall. Below this hollow—a narrow gorge worn deep into the hill—there lies a little hamlet, still half-hidden by the trees, thinned and tattered though they are, and nestling close under the shelter of the hill;—a score or so of white-walled houses, with roofs of red tiles weathered to soft shades of brown and russet, with plumes of blue smoke all trailing seawards, and with a fringe of orchards round it, where the mellow fruit is still glowing on the boughs. High over the roofs of the village rises the grey tower of the church, its turrets just clear above the clustering elms, in whose shadow lies the crowded graveyard,

A wide stretch of pasture-land divides the village from the sea. Yet, in old days—before the coming of the friars to the priory yonder, whose tower shows faintly against the low green hill that dies in a rocky headland by the sea, perhaps even before the legionaries stormed the great stronghold whose ruins crown this breezy hill-top—the little hamlet, now so far above the tide line, was, if antiquaries read its name aright, a place of boats. The fields about it are still below high-water mark. A high spring tide, before a gale from the westward, would even now reach right up to the village, were it not for the sea wall and the sand hills.

The sand hills are mere desert now. Yet they are pleasant enough in the summer time, when their short turf is bright with rest-harrow and crowfoot, when the great bells of the sea-convolvulus open wide on the hot sand, when tufts of pale thrift blossom in the shingle, and clumps of white campion, and frail flowers of yellow poppy. Pleasant then is the sweet breath of thyme and clover. Pleasanter still the smell of the sea, blown by soft summer airs over the wide mud-flats and the trampled sand.

The little hamlet, high and dry this many a day, is a port no longer. The only harvest of the sea that the villagers can glean in our time is that which wind and wave bring ashore upon this sandy beach. In the broken spars, the splintered timbers, the nameless waifs and strays of wreckage which the storm brings to their doors, the dwellers in the cottages that seem to crouch for shelter behind the old sea wall, find all their winter fuel.

There are traditions that many a cargo of spirits was run ashore here in smuggling days. Tales are still current of the hiding places where the goods were stored. It is said that even the church tower has in its time afforded sanctuary to bales of lace and kegs of liquor that never paid the King his due. This narrow pass may well have served the "free-traders" as a secret way into the hills.

But the long flight of rude stone steps that leads down it towards the village dates from an earlier time. To its use and history no clue remains. It is likely enough that it was the pathway to the camp from the long-vanished port below.

There is a legend in the country-side that it led up to the cell of an anchorite, a solitary who inhabited this ravine, and who, with his own hands, hewed and fitted the stones of the old stairway, now worn smooth by the feet of many centuries. Half-way up the pass, under the shelter of the limestone cliff, is his traditional dwelling place, a chamber hollowed in the living rock and roughly faced with masonry.

Who was he? A monk from the old priory yonder,—an outlaw with blood upon his soul?

It is a quiet spot. The crumbling walls look down through the rocky gateway of the gorge to the village at its foot; over the grey curve of shingle to the wet sands that, as the cloud veil lifts and scatters, are beginning now to shine like silver in the sunlight; to the grey sea, with sails showing ghost-like here and there; to the far shore, whose rugged outline looms faintly through the haze.

The brown elms of the village redden in the sunshine. There is a flush of colour on the belfry walls, on the limestone battlements above the pass, on the worn steps of the old stairway winding downward to the sea.

Yes, a quiet spot. There is no sound but the slumbrous music of the waves, at times the bark of a sheep-dog, a cattle-call from distant meadows, or the chatter of linnets on the hill.

On such a scene the old monk looked down. Such sounds were in his ears. Such rest and calm brooded over his rude dwelling—beast and bird his sole companions, the busy world shut out.

Was he the Father of the village, summoned from his cell to shrieve the dying, bless the dead? Was he a surly recluse, fond of solitude and silence?

From the rocky brow above the hermit's chamber the eye looks out over a wider world. A world no longer cold and colourless. The clouds have lifted from the sea; the sky has cleared; a flood of sunshine covers the whole landscape. It kindles on the red roofs of the village, it gilds the sombre leafage of the elms, it brightens the green meadows, turning all their straight-cut waterways to lines of silver. A tall beech that lifts its stately head above its fellows in the wood yonder reddens in the sunset. And the bright foliage of a row of Spanish chestnuts along the path that winds upwards from the shore flames like a river of light among the quiet-coloured elms and larches. A passing sail gleams white upon an opal sea. Over the wide west is spread a soft and golden glow; while far hills, range beyond range, are wrought in amethyst upon the lighted sky.

The traveller from Clovelly, making his way by coach towards the northern coast of Cornwall, pays no slight penalty, in the early stages of his ride at any rate, for the ease and comfort of his journey. It is but a dull and featureless road that crosses the miles of windswept moorland which fill so wide a stretch of the Devonshire marches. We have to leave unseen some of the grandest coast scenery in the county. We miss altogether the pleasant Vale of Hartland and the precipitous rocks of Black Mouth; and, above all, we see nothing of the world-forgotten nook of Hartland Quay, nestling close under its mighty wall of cliff.

It is a pleasant mode of travelling. There is a much greater charm about the box-seat of a coach than there is in the cosiest corner of a railway carriage. There is the charm of freshness and the open air, of hills and meadows and deep country lanes. But a man on a coach is not entirely his own master. The coach-ride gives no opportunity for anything like a leisurely survey. There is little time for exploring church or manor-house or abbey ruin. The old encampment, the cluster of grave-mounds, or the ancient cross of which perhaps the traveller may have caught a glimpse in passing, appeals to him in vain.

Morwenstow is among the spots we have to pass unseen. Yet it is well worth a pilgrimage. No picture, either of pen or pencil, can give a fair idea of that grey old tower by the sea, among its gnarled and storm-beaten trees, and set round with old figure-heads,—the sorrowful memorials of lost ships and of drowned mariners. And as at Clovelly, Kingsley is the central figure of all legends, old or new, so Morwenstow is haunted by memories of Hawker, for forty years the Vicar of the parish. He left his mark there in many ways. He built the vicarage, and above the vicarage door he traced these lines:—

Morwenstow we have to take on trust. But the coach goes through Kilkhampton, and here again it is the Church that is the centre of interest. Outside the old grey walls we are reminded of Hervey, sometime curate in Bideford, who in this quiet churchyard wrote his once famous Meditations. Within the building lie the ashes of a line of Grenvilles;—the greatest of them, indeed, rests not here, but somewhere in the Spanish Main. One monument is in memory of Sir Beville Grenville, who, after routing on Stamford Hill a Roundhead army twice as numerous as his own, was killed, a few weeks later, in the fight on Lansdowne. The field of battle is only four miles to the southward; and there, on the wall of the village inn, may still be seen this inscription, from the monument,—long since destroyed,—which was set up on the scene of conflict:—

As we drove out of Kilkhampton a brilliant sunset was flaming in the west, and the shadow of the coast was strangely lengthened on the grassy fringes of the road. By the time we had entered on the last league of the journey, the air, that all day long had been sweetened by the breath of wide sheets of gorse and heather, was blowing cool across the moors. And as we slowly descended the long hill to Bude, darkness was fairly settling down over the landscape.

Morning broke almost without a cloud. It was still summer, but there was a sign of coming change in the great flights of swallows that had assembled in the village street, clustering in thousands on roofs and telegraph wires, as if pausing for rest, or waiting until some coming storm should be overpast.

The sea was in quiet mood as we stood on the grassy brow of the cliff that skirts the shore; and they were the very gentlest of waves that rolled lazily in across the shining sand. But on every side there were tokens, only too plain to read, that this is among the most perilous of shores. Here a party of men were breaking up the iron frame-work of a wreck. There the life-boat crew, cleaning and painting and overhauling, stood ready by their gear. In many of the gardens by the canal are the battered figure-heads of ships, half hidden among shrubs and flowers. And in the churchyard above the village the white effigy of a turbaned warrior that once looked proudly down from the bows of the Bencoolen, now guards the grave of thirteen of her crew, lost when she came ashore here on these smooth sands some five-and-thirty years ago. In one of the houses of the village are preserved some arms—cutlases and muskets—that have been recovered from the wreck, so corroded and so encrusted with sand that their original shapes are hardly recognizable.

The sun went down behind an ominous-looking bank of cloud. That night the wind roared in the chimneys of the inn, and clouds of driving sand rattled like shot against the windows. Next morning found the sea in another temper altogether. Great green rollers were thundering up the beach, and leaping over the break-water in sheets of spray. Heavy clouds were rolling up from the southward, and altogether it was sufficiently clear that the swallows were well advised to put in for calmer weather.

The day's ride began under no pleasant conditions. Cold squalls of pitiless rain drove fiercely in our faces as we sat huddled together on the coach, glad to make use of every wrap and rug we had, and forcibly reminded of the old fisherman, who surveying the prostrate forms of his party of holiday makers, lying helpless in the boat, overcome by dire extremity of sickness, muttered softly to himself: "And they calls this goin' a-pleasurin!"

But the sun came out again as we went down the long slope into Boscastle; and, at length, when we drew up before the inn, the sky was clear. But the wind was blowing harder than ever as we made our way along the strange little harbour; and by the look-out station on the cliff it was as much as we could do to hold our own against the gale. A tremendous sea was breaking on the reefs outside, and thundering against the rocky wall below. Before us, far as eye could reach, stretched away the sunlit levels of the Atlantic, touched with a thousand twinkling points of light, and shot with changing tones of green and blue and amethyst.

Boscastle Minster lies in an ideal setting in its quiet woodland valley. But some travellers, at any rate, will look with less interest on its massive walls, on the decorated timbers of its noble roof, or on the time-blackened carvings of its beautiful bench-ends, than on the other church of Boscastle, at Forrabury, a mile or so to the westward. For this is the Silent Tower of Bottreaux, whose bells lie at the bottom of the sea, just outside the harbour.

All the world knows the story. How, when the church was first built, the village folk petitioned the Lord of Bottreaux for a peal of bells to hang in the new tower. How the bells were cast, and were on their way by sea from London. How, as the ship drew near Boscastle harbour, the pilot, a Tintagel man, heard the chimes of his own village ringing, and thanked God for fine weather and a prosperous voyage. How the captain scoffed: "Thank your own skill," said he, "and our stout craft and able seamanship." How the words were hardly uttered, when a sudden storm caught the vessel and dashed her to pieces on the rocks. How only the pilot reached land alive. And how, on wild nights of winter, when a storm is coming up from the Atlantic, the fisherman on the shore still hears the muffled tones of the long-lost Bottreaux bells, as the unquiet surges swing them in their ocean rest.

But the glory of the whole coast is Tintagel,—the birth-place of Arthur, the palace of King Marc of Cornwall. Though the village of Tintagel is half a mile or more inland, the ruins of the ancient stronghold stand partly on the brink of a cliff that overhangs the sea, but mainly on a bold headland almost surrounded by the waves. Some of the masonry is older even than the days of the Round Table, for in St. Juliet's Chapel there are, it is said, traces of Roman workmanship. Tintagel was still inhabited, either as a fortress or a prison until early Tudor times; but Leland describes it as having wholly gone to ruin. "It hath bene," he says in his gossiping Itinerary, "a marvelus strong and notable forteres, and almost situ loci inexpugnabile, especially for the donjon that is on the great high terrible cragge. But the residue of the buildinges of the castel be sore wether-beten an yn mine."

Standing on the brink of the tremendous cliff, with the waves and the wave-girt rock before, with the wind-swept downs behind, where the lonely church seems to crouch upon the short turf like a storm-driven sea-bird, and with the whole air full of the fretful murmur of the sea, we look down upon a page of old romance.

His must be a dull soul who, when the stern lines of the headland are dark against the glowing west, cannot people the old halls with shadowy figures, with the shapes of Arthur and his Knights, who, more than all other heroes, have been so

As we look over the perilous verge we have no eyes for the dark hues of the rock, for the whiteness of the leaping foam-cloud, or for the beauty of the blue levels of "the unquiet, bright Atlantic main." We have no ears for the croak of the raven, or the wail of the herring-gull, or even for the thunder of the sea. Our souls are with the past. As we climb the steep pathway to the summit of the headland, we think of Uther Pendragon and of Merlin. We see Sir Bedivere stooping beneath his burden. We hear the clink of

when

We see in fancy the prostrate figure of the guilty queen. We see

We hear the shock of that last battle in the west when

And when at length we stand within the windswept ruin we remember that it was here King Marc of Cornwall kept his court. It was to this sea-girt rock that Tristram of Lyonesse, the peerless hunter, harper, knight, brought home his master's bride, Iseult of Ireland. Within these very walls stood the two helpless, hapless lovers, caught all unaware in the fatal mesh of the enchanter. For among the treasures on board the ship that brought them to Tintagel was a golden cup, with a love-potion in it, prepared by the bride's mother, for Iseult and King Marc to drink upon their marriage day, "and for ever love each other."

But, alas, Iseult and Sir Tristram, in all innocence, drained the magic cup. The subtle potion fired their veins;

In fancy we see that other chamber, far off upon the coast of Brittany, where, after long years the Knight lay dying. We see him

We see Iseult standing in the moonlight, the spray of the sea-voyage on her cloak and hair. We hear her singing, in sweet voice and low, the promised