His pupils could never complain of distraction. The church-town--a single street of cottages winding round a knoll of elms which hide the Vicarage and all but the spire of St. Julian's Church--stands high and a mile back from the coast, and looks straight upon the Menawhidden reef, a fringe of toothed rocks lying parallel with the shore and half a mile distant from it. This reef forms a breakwater for a small inlet where the coombe which runs below Lansulyan meets the sea. Follow the road downhill from the church-town and along the coombe, and you come to a white-washed fishing haven, with a life-boat house and short sea-wall. The Porth is its only name. On the whole, if one has to live in Lansulyan parish the Porth is gayer than the church-town, where from the Vicarage windows you look through the trees southward upon ships moving up or down Channel in the blue distance and the white water girdling Menawhidden; northward upon downs where herds of ponies wander at will between the treeless farms, and a dun-coloured British earthwork tops the high sky-line. Dwellers among these uplands, wringing their livelihood from the obstinate soil by labour which never slackens, year in and year out, from Monday morning to Saturday night, are properly despised by the inhabitants of the Porth, who sit half their time mending nets, cultivating the social graces, and waiting for the harvest which they have not sown to come floating past their doors. By consequence, if a farmer wishes to learn the spiciest gossip about his nearest neighbour, he must travel down to the Porth for it. And this makes it the more marvellous that what I am about to tell, happening as it did at the very gates of the Porth, should have escaped the sharpest eyes in the place. The Vicar's custom was to read with me for a couple of hours in the morning and again for an hour and a half before dinner. We had followed this routine rigidly and punctually for three months or so when, one evening in June, he returned from the Porth a good ten minutes late, very hot and dusty, and even so took a turn or two up and down the room with his hands clasped behind his coat-tails before settling down to correct my iambics. "John Emmet is dead," he announced, pausing before the window with his back towards me and gazing out upon the ill-kept lawn. "Wasn't he the coxswain of the life-boat?" I asked. "Ah, to be sure, you never saw him, did you? He took to his bed before you came . . . a long illness. Well, well, it's all over!" Parson West sighed. "He saved, or helped to save, a hundred and fifteen lives, first and last. A hundred and fifteen lives!" "I've heard something of the sort down at the Porth. A hundred and fifty, I think they said. They seemed very proud of him down there." "Why?" The Vicar faced round on me, and added after a moment abruptly-- "He didn't belong to them: he was not even born in this parish." "Where then?"