Club in the old Guildhall down by the harbour. Marine painters, and those who sought to immortalize peasant life on their canvases, found ample subjects among the crags and coves and sea-weed-covered rocks where the blue water lapped softly, or the white waves came foaming and churning up; and the fisher-folk, bronzed, blue-eyed, and straight of limb, were models to set the heart of a Millet or a Wilkie on the thrill. To authors the quiet place, with its miles of moorland lying inland from the cliffs, was a ripe field for literary work. Novelists worked out their plots undisturbed by the hooting of motor horns or the whizzing of tram-cars; scientific men, who had spent years of study over the treasures of the British Museum or Kew, came there to sort out their materials for books of reference, and to have leisure for making certain experiments; writers of travels reviewed their notes, and archaeologists scheduled the antiquities of the neighbourhood. To this literary and artistic brotherhood Porthkeverne offered the calm of the country combined with the mental stimulus of intellectual comradeship, and though, in the inevitable march of events, its individual members often changed, the colony remained and flourished, and sent forth work of a character that was of value to the world of art and letters. Miss Kingsley and her sister, Miss Janet, themselves women of strong literary tastes, had come to the town with the rising tide of the Arts Settlement, and had established their school chiefly to meet the needs of the new colony. Most of their pupils were the children of painters and authors, though a few of the gentry and professional men of the district also took advantage of such a good local opportunity to educate their daughters. The Gables was a pleasant old-fashioned white house, standing on a narrow terrace of the cliff, with a high rock behind to screen it from the wind, and a view of grey roof-tops leading down to a peep of the harbour. In the sheltered garden grew, according to their season, white arum lilies and rosy tamarisk, aloes and myrtle and oleander and other beautiful half-tropical shrubs, while geraniums, carnations and humbler flowers bloomed in profusion. There was a veranda covered with a wistaria, and most of the class-room windows were framed with sweet-smelling creepers. Long afterwards, when the pupils looked back to their time at The Gables, they would always connect certain lessons with the strong scent of honeysuckle, or the faint odour of tea roses, for the flowers seemed just as much a part of the general culture of the school as were the Botticelli pictures on the library walls, or the weekly recitals of modern music.