To anyone who loves England, and that beauty which is so characteristically English, where the life of the present day is visibly linked with the life of the past through long centuries of security, where age has ripened all, the great old trees, the colours of old oak and weather-beaten tiles and warm brick, has gently undulated straight lines, and softened all sharp angles, where the very sunlight has the mellowness of old wine, to a mind perceptive of this peculiar and intimate charm of England, Dunster makes a special call, set amid the suave curves of its rich country, crowned by its ancient castle, dignified by its old, beautiful church (grown, like the castle, through Norman and Early English and Perpendicular styles of architecture), yet intimate and familiar, and beautiful most of all because of the use and wont of daily life within its walls. CHAPTER VIII LUNDY It is curious in this twentieth century of ours, when every corner of the habitable globe is docketed, measured, mapped, and surveyed, when a railroad runs across "darkest Africa," and the great ice-wall of the Antarctic cannot keep its inviolability from the feet of those resolute and heroic explorers who go with camera, microscope, and theodolite, against such forces of Nature as would daunt anything but the resolute human heart--it is curious to come across small corners of the world where the law of nations seemingly does not run, and the current of the modern world sweeps by, leaving them in a backwater, strangely aloof and undisturbed. Such is the island of Herm, in the Channel Isles; such are one or two volcanic rocks in the Greek Archipelago, which you may purchase for a song, and live on if you can, though their barren waterlessness under the midsummer suns will compel you to put out to sea again for all the dangers of swift currents and black crags; such, too, I imagine, are some of those enchanted small islands in the South Seas of which Conrad writes: "It was as if the earth had gone on spinning, and had left that crumb of its surface alone in space"; such, too, is Lundy. But Lundy is only fourteen miles from the English coast, this populous and organized England, and in the mouth of the Bristol Channel, in the direct track of all the shipping of the West--sighted, it is estimated, by at least a million vessels a year in their business up and down the world--and yet, to within the last generation, it was almost as inaccessible as in the days when the de Mariscos built their castle there and defied the King and all his armies.