Local connoisseurs of the picturesque prefer Bossington, now that Porlock is worn a little threadbare and grown so dusty. They are of opinion that Bossington is the quainter of the two. But to come to judgment in this frame is not wholly in order, for the places are of such different types, and cannot fairly be compared. Porlock is a considerable village, with numerous shops; and Bossington is but a hamlet, without a church, and apparently with no shops at all. It is a very sequestered place, standing on the Horner, about a mile distant, north-eastward, from Porlock. The great recommendations of Bossington in these latter days are that motor-cars never or rarely get there, and that it is by consequence quiet and dustless. Porlock is on the main road—on the way to that Somewhere Else which is ever your typical motorist’s quest: a quest he relinquishes at night, only to resume it the next morning. Bossington stands in the way to Nowhere in Particular, and the roads that lead to it are less roads than lanes. That they may long continue their narrow, rough, and winding character is the wish of those who wish Bossington well. [Illustration: BOSSINGTON.] For the rest, it is pre-eminently a hamlet of chimneys. The chimneys of Porlock are themselves a remarkable feature of that place, but at Bossington they are _the_ feature. They are all of a remarkable height. There are coroneted chimneys; round chimneys, with pots and without; chimneys square, and chimneys finished off with slates set up (as wind-breakers) at an angle, something like a simple problem in Euclid. The next great feature of Bossington is its immense walnut-tree, whose trunk measures sixteen feet in circumference. This is the chieftain of all the many walnut-trees that flourish in the neighbourhood. The modern Wesleyan Chapel of Bossington puts its stuccoed brother at Porlock to shame. It is a pretty building, designed in good taste, built of stone banded with blue brick, and is finished off with a quaintly louvred turret. Not even the neighbouring restored chapel of Lynch, rescued from desecration by the late Sir Thomas Dyke Acland, looks more worshipful. Bossington street, irregularly fringed with rustic cottages, and with the Horner on one side fleeting amid its pebbles to the sea, is as unconventional as a farmyard, and ends at last on the great shingle-bank of Porlock Bay, where two or three ruined old houses stand against the skyline and look as if they had known stirring incidents of shipwreck and smuggling, as indeed they probably have, in abundance.