side to the beach. “Such is Looe as beheld from a distance; and it loses none of its attractions when you look at it more closely. There is no such thing as a straight street in the place, no martinet of an architect has been here, to drill the old stone houses into regimental regularity. Sometimes you go down steps into the ground floor, sometimes you mount an outside staircase to get to the bed‐rooms. Never were such places devised for hide‐and‐seek since that exciting nursery game was first invented. No house has fewer than two doors leading into two different lanes; some have three, opening at once into a court, a street, and a wharf, all situated at different points of the compass. The shops, too, have their diverting irregularities, as well as the town. Here you might call a man Jack‐of‐ all‐trades, as the best and truest compliment you could pay him—for here one shop combines in itself a smart drug‐mongering, cheese‐mongering, stationery, grocery, and oil and Italian line of business; to say nothing of such cosmopolitan commercial miscellanies as wrinkled apples, dusty nuts, cracked slate pencils, and fly‐blown mock jewellery. The moral good which you derive, in the first pane of a window, from the contemplation of brief biographies of murdered missionaries, and serious tracts against intemperance and tight lacing, you lose in the second, before such fleshly temptations as ginger‐bread, shirt studs, and fascinating white hats for Sunday wear at two‐and‐ninepence a‐piece. Let no man rightly say that he has seen all that British enterprise can do for the extension of British commerce until he has carefully studied the shop‐fronts of the tradesmen of Looe. “Then, when you have at last threaded your way successfully through the streets, and have got out on the beach, you see a pretty miniature bay formed by the extremity of a green hill on the right, and by fine jagged slate rocks on the left. Before this seaward quarter of the town is erected a strong bulwark of rough stones, to resist the incursion of high tides. Here the idlers of the place assemble to lounge and gossip, to look out for any outward‐bound ships that are to be seen in the Channel, and to criticise the appearance and glorify the capabilities of the little fleet of Looe fishing‐boats riding snugly at anchor before them at the entrance of the bay.