It was the sweet season of spring, and the flowers of balmy April were in all their bloom; the young and fragrant buds were bursting in the woods of Rhoscadzhel, and the willows that gave a name to the long narrow glen, forming the avenue to Porthellick, were as green, as leafy, and as graceful in their droop, as when Constance, dark-eyed and pale-faced, sat at the windows of the pretty white villa, watching for her husband, Richard, cantering his horse to the little portico, where Derrick Braddon awaited him; Denzil going forth to whip the trouting-stream, or Sybil sitting, sketch-book in hand, under a tree, to shade her from the sunshine. The Trevanion Arms, over which creaked and swung a signboard decorated with the arms of that old surname, a fesse between two chevrons, with three escallops (for old Jack, like every Cornishman, had a pedigree), is a picturesque little old-fashioned house, partly built of granite and partly of straw and mud beaten into a consistency that is pretty enduring. Four boulders that had lain for ages on the promontory where it stands, had been improvised as corner-stones by the first builders of the edifice, and then the erection proved easy enough. It is square, with a trellised porch, which is always a mass of flowers and leaves; two windows are on each side of this, and five above, while there are other little quaint dormers that abut from the roof, which is conical, or pavilion-shaped, to write more correctly: and the edifice was then, from its foundation to its apex, chimneys included, literally a mass of clematis, dark green ivy, jasmine and sweet briar, so matted and interwoven as completely to conceal where the wall ended and the roof began; and in the pairing season the snug recesses of this leafy covering were all alive with teeming nests and twittering birds, whose gaping bills and glittering eyes peeped forth at times when a frocked waggoner or dusky-visaged miner drew up at the door for a pot of creamy ale, or a quart of sharp, foaming Devonshire cider. Though April, the night on which we visit this place is bleak; the rain is swooping in torrents on the drenched land, and tossing sea; black clouds envelop all the Bristol Channel, the wild waves of which were rolling in snowy foam against the bluffs of Tintagel, along Trebarreth Strand, and all that iron shore from thence, perhaps, to Cape Cornwall, for it was just such a night of storm as the old Cornish wreckers would have loved, and hung their lanterns on the cliffs to mislead doomed ships at sea.