‘Swiftly goes the age, and slowly crawls improvement. The greater part of that land will be only broken up to be exhausted by corn-crop after corn-crop, till it can bear no more, and the very manure which is drawn home from it in the shape of a few turnips will be wasted by every rain of heaven, and the straw probably used to mend bad places in the road with; while the land returns to twenty years of worse sterility than ever; on the ground that— ‘“Veather did zo, and gramfer did zo, and why shouldn’t Jan do the zame?”’ * * * * ‘But here is Morte below us. “The little grey church on the windy shore,” which once belonged to William de Tracy, one of your friend Thomas à Becket’s murderers. If you wish to vent your wrath against those who cut off your favourite Saxon hero, there is a tomb in the church which bears De Tracy’s name; over which rival Dryasdusts contend fiercely with paper-arrows: the one party asserting that he became a priest, and died here in the wilderness; the others that the tomb is of later date, that he fled hence to Italy, under favour of a certain easy-going Bishop of Exeter, and died penitent and duly shriven, according to the attestations of a certain or uncertain Bishop of Cosenza.’ ‘Peace be with him and with the Bishop! The flight to Italy seems a very needless precaution to a man who owned this corner of the world. A bailiff would have had even less chance here then than in Connemara a hundred years ago.’ ‘He certainly would have fed the crabs and rock-cod in two hours after his arrival. Nevertheless, I believe the Cosenza story is the safer one.’ ‘What a chaos of rock-ridges!—Old starved mother Earth’s bare-worn ribs and joints peeping out through every field and down; and on three sides of us, the sullen thunder of the unseen surge. What a place for some “gloom-pampered man” to sit and misanthropize!’ ‘“Morte,” says the Devonshire proverb, “is the place on earth which heaven made last, and the devil will take first.”’ ‘All the fitter for a misanthrope. But where are the trees? I have not seen one for the last four miles.’