At Lyme an inn received me: a room full of fishermen and agricultural workers, a smell of supper preparing, and much drinking of cider. It was the New Inn, and I was told that this room was only the tap-room and not usually used by visitors. I found that one wing of the old building had been specially fitted for travellers, and I will gladly name it to all my readers who are satisfied with an old-fashioned comfort, a good bed and good fare. After supper I bought a packet of sailor's shag, and went out smoking into the chief street. A few steps took me to the Cobb, and I leaned over the low wall and contemplated the glorious green sea, tumbling and gurgling below me. I always think that the union of mighty stone slabs and the sea is most satisfying to look upon--there is something endlessly good and noble about such a thing. I think a building of hewn stone when it dips into the water should act as a sedative to the mind, should teach one to become calm, slow and strong; to deal generously in rectitudes and essentials. It was late in August, and the mellow chimes of the parish church had just boomed eight o'clock. The great orange moon hung over the bay, and the night came creeping over the rich yellow sand which crowns the Golden Cap. Then the cliffs merged into a fainter confusion. Bats came out and flitted about the old houses by the Buddle river, and the night became the natural haunt of restless spirits. A candle flickering behind a leaded casement brought back suddenly the memory of a home long passed away and whatever blessings belong to my childhood. And all of a sudden that inexplicable heart-hunger for the place of my birth gripped me, and Youth (whatever Youth may be), with its sights, its undefinable, insistent spell, came back to me in one flash--Youth came to me from the old houses on the sea-wall, borne with the misty saltness of the sea air. Go away; travel the length and breadth of the land, visit a hundred cities, encounter a hundred new experiences, and form a hundred conflicting impressions of stranger scenes and places; go where you will, and do what you will; one day you will have seen and done enough, and you will find your thoughts turned again to the haunts of Youth. At the sight of those ruffianly looking old dwellings by the riverside my memory was carried back to another small seaport town where, long enough ago, I played at smuggling. Are we not all haunted by certain landscapes which come back unbidden, not as topographical facts, but as vestures of the soul? Their enchantment is in our blood, and their meaning uncommunicable.