I had been wandering over the centre of Exmoor, killing trout as I went, through a country which owes its civilization and tillage to the spirit of one man, who has found stag-preserving by no means incompatible with large agricultural improvements; among a population who still evince an unpleasant partiality for cutting and carrying farmers’ crops by night, without leave or licence, and for housebreaking after the true classic method of Athens, by fairly digging holes through the house walls; a little nook of primeval savagery fast reorganizing itself under the influences of these better days. I had been on Dartmoor, too; but of that noble moorland range so much has been said and sung of late, that I really am afraid it is becoming somewhat cockney and trite. Far and wide I had wandered, rod in hand, becoming a boy again in the land of my boyhood, till, once more at Ilfracombe, opposite me sat Claude Mellot, just beginning to bloom again into cheerfulness. We were on the point of starting for Morte, and so round to Saunton Court, and the sands beyond it; where a Clovelly trawler, which we had chartered for the occasion, had promised to send a boat on shore and take us off, provided the wind lay off the land. But, indeed, the sea was calm as glass, the sky cloudless azure; and the doubt was not whether we should be able to get on board through the surf, but whether, having got on board, we should not lie till nightfall, as idle ‘As a painted ship, Upon a painted ocean.’