The truth of this description will easily be recognized by all who have witnessed a storm and its effects upon the rock-bound Cornish coast. Then there gather upon the points or bluffs above the harbour mouths, or on the sea-swept piers and quays groups of frightened women and children, and men with anxious faces gazing out over the wild expanse of foam-flecked seas to watch for the return of the boats, or, maybe, the manœuvres of some brave ship which has suddenly found herself on a lee shore. Those are times when the heart-strings of men are taut, and when the tears of women are in their eyes. Few sights are more sad, either to sailor or to landsman, than the break up of a fine vessel upon a rocky coast, when the heavy seas pound the strongest works of men into matchwood, and the fabric of the ship seems indeed to dissolve before one’s eyes. Old Polperro folk--mostly women, it must be admitted--still talk with bated breath of the uncanny doings of a certain John Stevens, who dealt in occult arts in the middle part of the last century; and of another “witch,” who dwelt in an outlying hut near the quaint village of Crumplehorn, just a short distance up the valley. In the days, which some of the old people yet remember, none would go near her hut after dusk, and at least one old lady survived till comparatively recent times who had seen (so she told us) “the devil or the witch flying up out of the chimney on a broomstick.” But these were sights seen in days when the little harbour was seldom entered except by the fishing craft of the place itself, and strangers but once or so in a generation found their way down by the steep hill road to the place where the sea meets the land, and the murk of storm in winter days is so often, by reason of the death and devastation wrought, a firmer limned memory than the glorious clarity of Cornish sunshine and the azure tint of a summer sea.