he said, and we followed him meekly. Inquiries were fruitless here; we were sent away with scant ceremony. At the lodge gates of the lordly mansion we had seen earlier we halted on our weary way, and asked if possibly we could be recommended to some resting-place. We had some faint hopes that they would take compassion upon us here, but the lodge-keeper, who pondered her head vainly to answer our question satisfactorily, made no offer. There was nothing for it, then, but to walk on to Veryan. Night shut down impenetrable on the moorlands, and darkness brushed our faces as we plunged into the unknown from the inhospitable hamlet of Saint Michael Caerhayes. Civilisation became an unmeaning term, or if aught of significance the word yet retained, it left in the chambers of the mind a satiric tang; for the steep paths, rocky, winding, and altogether insignificant, upon which we presently fared to the seaboard, seemed rather fortuitous than planned, and an emphatic comment upon primary conditions, rather than a subdual of them. It was the booming of the surf hundreds of feet below us that advised our coming upon the sea, and cottage windows, two or three, shining in glow-worm fashion, showed us where lay Port Holland, deep-set at the seaward end of a valley, where the unseen waves spent their force amid sands and stones, with a long-drawn sighing a-h-h-h, a-h-h-h. To Port Holland instantly succeeded Saint Lo, in another bight--both wild, lonely, and (for us tourists, at least) shelterless. We spoke with two formless concentrations of blackness, who knew naught of accommodation for strangers, and readily (nay, with alacrity) gave us good night. Then we, with what cheer we might, to climb the road that now ascended inland the western side of a valley, moist and teeming with nocturnal life, that rustled and ran among the brake and underwood, and chirped and squeaked as our straying feet sent fragments of stone and rock rolling into its ferny lairs. And now, on this solitary road, we lost our way at an occult forking of the path, uncharted by any finger-post. We felt assured of it as we walked on for miles, and the road wound round and about with never another sign of the sea, which should have been within hearing. At length the road forked again, with a sign-post set in a hedge at the angle. We had no matches; the hedge forbade any near approach to the finger-board.