The smell of fish is strong in the air; the fishing-boats lie in neat rows, supported by legs to prevent their heeling over when the tide runs out. The houses cluster on the steep hillside in terraces, and below them a collection of blue-guernseyed stout-booted men, with wholesome sea-tanned faces, lounge about as if they were the idlest set in Christendom, though their work demands the hardest toil and greatest endurance of any calling man can follow. Polperro is strangely like a little town in Brittany and has something about it also which recalls the inland villages tucked away in the spurs of the Alps or Apennines above the Riviera. It is easy to imagine that anyone having visited it and trying to recall where he had looked upon such a scene, would search his memory for tours abroad and never think of England. A good road leads up out of this valley on the Looe side and once the hill is surmounted it may be remarked with surprise that at the cost of going a little round it actually tries to keep on the level; that is not a practice habitual to Cornish roads, which seem to take a pure delight in a switchback manner of progress. This road was cut in 1849, the means of arriving at Polperro before that being something like falling down the face of a cliff. Polperro was the home of Jonathan Couch, the naturalist, grandfather of the novelist Sir A. Quiller-Couch, who lives a short way off at Fowey. Mr. Thomas Couch's _History of Polperro_ embodying his father, Jonathan Couch's, notes, and published in 1871, may still be read with interest. He pictures himself standing on the height of Brent. "Immediately below are the harbour, valley and town of Polperro; the Peak with its striking jagged outline and massive black colouring; the sail-loft resting in a recess on its side; the ledges of rocks here and there hollowed into caverns, and the quays, between which are the fishing-boats riding quietly in tiers. Further up among the hills which shut this scene in you see strange, and apparently confused, groups of houses, having a general tint of whitewash, and, above them, on the southern side, the little Chapel of St. John." [Illustration: LOOE]