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A GREY OLD HOUSE BY THE SEA 235

THE MONK'S RETREAT 250

TINTAGEL 258

AT CLOVELLY.

There are few parts of English coast-line whose traditions are more picturesque than those of the beautiful sea-board of Devon. Its shores are haunted by memories of the great Armada, of the deeds of Drake and Hawkins, of Howard and Raleigh, and of many another old sea-dog, who played his part in the making of our island story. It was the coast of Devonshire that was first harried by the Danes, when, in the words of the Anglo-Saxon chronicle, "three ships of Northmen, out of Denmark," put in to plunder Teignmouth. The other side of the county suffered most. Again and again the hamlets on the northern shore were wasted by the merciless invaders. The isle of Lundy, that from the land shows like a faint blue bar along the sky line, has a stirring story of its own. It has served in its time as a stronghold even of corsair Algerines. Pirates from Spain and Holland each held it in their turn. On the beach of its only landing place there still lies, buried in the shingle, an ancient gun that was hurled over the cliff by the French when they were about to leave the island. Its rightful lords themselves were, in the good old days, little better, probably, than buccaneers.

Kingsley's pictures of South American forests have fired the heart of many a reader, old as well as young, to see for himself the wonders of those enchanted regions, to gaze on a giant ceiba tree, like that on the green steeps above La Guayra, where "Parrots peeped in and out of every cranny, while, within the air of woodland, brilliant lizards basked like living gems upon the bark, gaudy finches flitted and chirrupped, butterflies of every size and colour hovered over the topmost twigs, innumerable insects hummed from morn till eve; and, when the sun went down, tree-toads came out to snore and croak till dawn."

But those descriptions, marvellous as they are, were borrowed from books. It was not until fourteen years after that passage was written that "the dream of forty years" was fulfilled; that the author of "At Last" was able to see with his own eyes the West Indies and the Spanish Main; could, as he says, "compare books with facts, and judge for myself of the reported wonders of the earthly paradise." But it is quite another thing when he is talking of the coast of Devon. There his foot is on his native heath. He was not, it is true, born within sound of the sea, but some of his earliest memories were of Hartland and Welcombe, of Bideford and Clovelly. Above all of Clovelly. To use his wife's words, "His love for Clovelly was a passion." Even his well-loved Eversley had hardly a warmer place in his regard.

Kingsley was just eleven when his father became rector there, and for some six years he doubtless spent most of his holidays at least among the scenes which he describes so well. Thirteen years passed before he went back. "I cannot believe my eyes," he wrote to his wife; "the same place, the pavement, the same dear old smells, the dear old handsome, loving faces again." The cottages are much the same as when last he saw them, now nearly fifty years ago, "with jessamine and fuchsia running up the windows." Just the same as then is "the narrow paved cranny of a street, vanishing downwards, stair below stair." Any change there is must be for the better. The village has been drained; that is a substantial improvement, and the fuchsias and climbers have wreathed half the hamlet in a very bower of green. Clovelly Church--so far away that the sound of its bells never reaches the village in the cleft below--has few features of its own to recommend it. But the grey-haired sexton remembers how he sat with young Kingsley in the choir, sixty years since, when they were boys together. And the churchyard is to us like a chapter of romance. Half the names we know best in "Westward Ho!" are on its stones.

Here are two names that conjure up those "five desperate minutes" on the mountain road when the gold train was taken; when the surviving Spaniards, "two only, who were behind the rest, happening to be in full armour, escaped without mortal wound, and fled down the hill again." They were chased by "Michael Evans and Simon Heard ... two long and lean Clovelly men ... who ran two feet for the Spaniards' one; and in ten minutes returned, having done their work." Another stone reminds us of "the armourer, who sat tinkering a head-piece," humming a ballad in honour of his birthplace. "'Tis Sunderland, John Squire, to the song, and not Bidevor," said his mate. "Well, Bidevor's as good as Sunderland any day, for all there's no say-coals there blacking a place about."

The names of Ebbsworthy and Parracombe recall that scene by the banks of the Meta, when Amyas went with Ayacanora in search of two of his men, who had taken to the forest, each with an Indian bride. It was Parracombe who asked only to be left "in peace, alone with God and God's woods, and the good wives that God has given us, to play a little like school children. It's long since I've had play-hours, and now I'll be a little child once more, with the flowers and the singing birds and the silver fishes in the stream that are at peace and think no harm, and want neither clothes, nor money, nor knighthood, nor peerage, but just take what comes."

We can stand there now and look out over just such a scene as Amyas saw when, "outside, the south-west wind blew fresh and strong, and the moonlight danced upon a thousand crests of foam; but within the black, jagged point which sheltered the town, the sea did but heave in long, oily swells of rolling silver, onward into the black shadow of the hills, within which town and pier lay invisible, save where a twinkling light gave token of some weary fisher's wife, watching the weary night through for the boat which would return with dawn."

The beech below, the "steep hillside fenced with oak wood," are at least the same as in Kingsley's time. And if the stout craft that he used to watch putting out from the pier have not outlived the gales of half a century, there are men on the fishing boats of to-day that remember him well. There are those in the village who recollect even his father, "a man who feared no danger, and could steer a boat, hoist and lower a sail, shoot a herring net, and haul a seine as one of themselves." Who that stands looking seaward from the ancient quay, whose rude, unmortared masonry has weathered full five hundred winters, and watches the great green rollers thundering up the beach, but thinks of the bay as Kingsley saw it, "darkened with the grey columns of the waterspouts, stalking across the waves before the northern gale; and the tiny herring-boats fleeing from their nets right for the breakers, hoping more mercy even from those iron walls of rock than the pitiless, howling waste of spray behind them?" Yes, it is "Westward Ho!" country. Turn where we will--the bay, the cliffs, the woods, the village--all remind us of Amyas Leigh, of Will Carey, of Salvation Yeo.

THE SOUND OF THE SEA.

The long curve of the shore on either side this little fishing port, guarded here by a mighty wall of cliff, here by steep faces of red rock, and bordered here with fields that come down nearly to the water's edge, is fringed with a wide belt of shingle--no smooth stretch of yellow sand, but miles and miles of great grey pebbles, the ruins of old cliffs, the wreck of rocky battlements shattered by the surges, and rolled and shaped and rounded by the rude play of winds and waves. Down the long shore, headland beyond headland shows fainter and more faint, until the shadowy outline of the land fades into the far horizon. Westward from the harbour, a long cliff towers above the shore, with strange curves and mighty buttresses, of endless shades of red and brown, its seaworn faces weathered to cool grey or stained to inky black, touched with the gold of clinging lichens and the bright green of tiny ferns. Along its ledges sturdy rowan trees are rooted, among thickets of gorse and bracken and heather. Higher up there hangs over the rocky brows a crown of dwarf oak trees, gnarled and storm-beaten.

At the foot of the vast wall, growing dim now as evening darkens, is a little space of shingle-covered beach, that at high water is altogether shut out from the world. When the tide is in there is no way in or out. If on the steep side of the cliff there are tracks up which a goat might clamber, yet round the points of rock that fence it in, against which now the waves are breaking, there will be no way for hours. For hours nor voice nor foot of man can break the quiet of this lonely spot. A single gull, rocking idly on the waves, over its double in the clear water under it, and one solitary cormorant standing erect and motionless on a great rock that is almost as dark as he, deepen the sense of solitude. Solitude there is, but not silence. The warm air of the summer twilight is full of the sound of the sea--"low at times, and loud at times, and changing like a poet's rhymes;" and after each wave-beat on the storm-worn rocks the dark cliff overhead so flings back the answer that it seems as if

"From each cave and rocky fastness, In its vastness, Floats some fragment of a song"

The hour is late. The cliff grows cold and sombre. Darkness is settling in its cavernous hollows. The shadow of the shore steals slowly out over the pale green sea. Over the bay are scattered the fishing-boats of the port, still far off, but making for home towards the tiny quay that, from the shore below the village, stretches out its sheltering arm. Far out at sea, beyond the jagged line of tumbling waves against the sky, lies a great ocean highway, whose white sails and drifting smoke show faintly through the haze. Over the vast sea, here dark with shifting cloud-shadows, there still bright in the clear sunshine, are hues a painter might toil for in vain. Who could render the swift changes of colour that wind and sun are weaving with their magical loom over the wide expanse? Here a band of pale, clear green stretches far across the bay; here a belt of soft amber; there a long stretch of rich, imperial purple, with endless interchange of brown and green and blue, ruffled with light flaws of wind, and touched at far intervals with white points of foam, as of waves that were fleeing from the rougher sea outside.

The art of man might copy to the life the curve of that great green wave, with scraps of seaweed showing darkly through its cool, transparent depths; but not the deftest hand that ever drew could give the low roar of the incoming roller, the sound of its plunge on the unyielding rock. The painter might imitate the snowy whiteness of the water beaten suddenly into foam, but not its seething hiss as it rushes in among the boulders, not the rattle of the pebbles as the wave draws back for its next plunge along the beach. He might show us the glisten of the wet stones, rounded and polished by the eternal chafing of the surges; he might make the white foam flicker in the black shadows under them, but not the sullen sound of boulders shaken to their stony roots by the resistless tide--boulders that on rough nights of winter, when the lighthouse tower is veiled in storm-drift, and great waves are thundering on the bar, are hurled like play-things up and down the beach. The cormorant on the canvas might be to the full as stately and sombre as that dark figure yonder, brooding like some spirit of evil; but no shout could startle him to flight, driving him, with slow beat of his broad wings, to seek safety in some still more secluded resting-place. The clearest colours of the palette, the deftest touches of the brush, the highest ideal of the painter can give us but one glimpse of what after all is one unending change. His may be the ideal. This is the real, the restless, seething, stormy sea. What is the sea without its sound? As we gaze at the dumb fury of a painted storm--the fatal reef, the doomed ship, the white lash of the pitiless surges, it is to Fancy alone that we must look for

"The sound of the trampling surf On the rocks and the hard sea sand."

But now the fishing-boats are coming in. Their brown sails, always so dear to the soul of the artist, have taken colour from the flaming west, and shine like fiery orange in the light of sunset. Their dark hulls are glistening with spray, the white foam shines like silver underneath their bows. One after one they near the shore, and as they pass into the shadow of the cliff the silver melts from the hissing foam below them, the borrowed colour fades slowly from their sails, that, as each craft reaches her moorings, rattle down, mere heaps of sombre, sea-beaten canvas. Boats are putting out from the shore to bring in the fish. Groups of idlers and fishing-folk gather on the quay. For the moment the hum of voices rises louder through the narrow street of the little town, half hidden now in the darkness of the hollow--the little town that is like no other in the islands.

"'Tis a stairway, not a street. That ascends the deep ravine."

The sun is down. Far off across the bay the lighthouse has mounted guard over the bar,--the very bar over which

"Three fishers went sailing away to the west, Away to the west as the sun went down."

Now silence begins to settle on the village. The bearded vikings are gone from the seat where, night after night, they spin the same old yarns; where night after night the wayfarer over-hears scraps of seafaring talk--of prodigious hauls of fish, of hairbreadth escapes, of trawlers that, fleeing from a storm, were caught on the very threshold and dashed to flinders on the quay.

A sound of the sea is in it all. And when the last group of idlers has broken up, when the clatter of the last belated footsteps has died away up the little, unlighted, stony street, and the hush of night is brooding on this quaint old village, the song of the sea grows louder still. Now through the quiet air comes faintly up the cry of some wandering plover, the muttered croak of a solitary heron. All night the little town is full of voices of the sea--

"The grand, majestic symphonies of ocean."

THE VIKINGS SEAT.

Half way down the one street of this "little wood-embosomed fishing town--a steep stair of houses clinging to the cliff," as Kingsley calls it, is one of the few level spaces that break the otherwise abrupt descent. No better place could have been chosen for a seat, for no point in all the village commands so wide a view of the sea. There is no place so good as this for watching the trawlers putting out, hauled slowly to the head of the quay, and then spreading their great brown mainsails,--double-reefed of late, for there is mostly a stiff breeze outside the bay. On the left, in front of one of the prettiest of many pretty houses in the village, half covered with a bower of creepers, is a low wall, on which, when their day's work is done, the sailors and the old sea captains gather for their nightly gossip. Below are groups of cottages, scattered in picturesque confusion, with ancient roofs of crumbling slate, and quaint old gables, all wreathed in creepers and honeysuckle and tall fuchsias. Lower still is the old quay, five centuries old, with brown fishing nets hung up to dry, and with a half-score or so of trawlers moored to old corroded guns embedded in the masonry, their tall masts swaying idly on the long swell that now, at high tide, fills the little harbour. The fishermen are still busy over their gear. When all is stowed they will make their way up here, to the wall yonder, or to this bench, to talk over the doings of the day. Here the old captains, grey-headed, storm-beaten sea kings, sit, night after night, and spin over and over their well-worn yarns. There is not so much in their speech of

"... the magic charm of foreign lands, With shadows of palms, and shining sands;"

not so much of the high seas,

"Of ships dismasted, that were hailed, And sent no answer back again,"

as of disasters nearer home, of some mishap among the boats.

It is always the boats. The talk is ever and ever the same--of spars carried away, of split mainsails, of the failure of the fishing. A few days since the trawlers put out with a fair wind and a smooth sea. The trawls were not yet down when clouds swept off the land, the air was darkened by a great rush of rain, and a sudden storm, with heavy squalls of wind, broke over the boats. One by one the brown sails disappeared. On the quay stood a group of anxious figures vainly endeavouring to peer through the storm. When the weather cleared it was seen that one of the boats was in trouble. A squall had laid her on her beam ends, and she shipped a heavy sea. The men had given themselves up for lost, for no help could have got to them in time, even had their plight been seen; when, happily for them, the bowsprit carried away, some of the strain was taken off, and the boat righted. All next day her skipper was strolling idly on the quay, like a man dazed; and as you pass the Vikings' Seat in the evening, or indeed any little knot of sailors, you will still hear scraps of the story.

The gravestones round the church on the hill are evidence enough of the risks they run that go down to the sea in ships. More eloquent still are the tales of the old fishermen:--how, for instance, in one great storm, now "five-and-fifty years agone," as they put it, twenty-one men from this port were drowned in the bay, within sight of land. Still farther back, "a matter of one-and-seventy years agone," no fewer than thirty-two were lost; and the whole population of the port is even now not much over two hundred. Of such great disasters the churchyard has few records. So strong are the currents in the bay that bodies are seldom recovered. Some of the stones are only in memory of those whose rest remains unknown--not here, but somewhere in the stormy sea.

Every son of the village is a fisherman born. Every man has been a sailor almost since he could remember anything. Few as are the inhabitants of the place, twenty of them are captains on the high seas, or, having spent their lives in battling with the storm, have put in for the last time to spend in this harbour of refuge their few remaining days. These are the men of the old school, who, from childhood to old age, have kept green the memory of their native village, always cherishing the hope

"... their long vexations past, Here to return, and die at home at last."

The modern captain is a more prosperous man. He knows more of the world. He is not content with the narrow street, the tiny rooms, the small affairs of this awkward out-of-the-way corner. His home will be at some larger port. In twenty years there will be few of the old race of sea captains left to rule the conclaves round the Vikings' Seat.

They are a kindly race, those West Country fishermen. Kingsley's eulogies of his beloved Devon folk were never more deserved than here, never were more true than now:--a warm-hearted, honest, pleasant-spoken race, gentle and courteous, yet free and independent as ever. A fine old figure is that venerable, white-headed, white-bearded mariner, whose memories go back over eighty years of seafaring life. He is never tired of the story of a sailor of this village, who, returning home in a gold-ship, was cast away on Norfolk Island--then entirely uninhabited--together with his wife and a handful of the crew. The men saved nothing from the wreck but one precious lucifer match, parent of all the fires they had in many dreary years. Some of the party, in despair, put off in a boat, but nothing was ever known as to their fate. Years passed before a sealing brig put in and took off the few survivors. The portrait of the castaway and his wife, in their rude dress of skins, sewn with bone needles of their own making, is still shewn in the village--he, with lifted hand, as if pointing to the long-looked-for sail; she, with a bright look of joy upon her pretty face.

The white-haired sailor, for all his eighty years of sailing, has never been out of sight of land; but that tall, grizzled sea captain standing yonder has been round the Horn more times than he can well reckon up. After forty years he came home, with every intention of getting another ship, feeling that nothing could ever part him from the sea. But the years have passed, and still he lingers in the village. Nothing now could tempt him from the shore. Of all the wonders of his forty years' experience, none seems to have burnt itself so deep into his memory as a night in the tropics, in a perfect calm, on a smooth and oily sea, in which all the stars were copied with such perfect clearness that, as he puts it, "you would almost think there really was another world, and that you were in it."

In a doorway hard by, festooned after the manner of the place with creepers and tall fuchsias, is a picture for an artist. At the threshold there sits, on the brick-floor, the grandfather, an old, sunburnt, sea-beaten fisherman, nursing a fair-haired, rosy-cheeked youngster, who laughs and crows and struggles to escape the old man's careful arm, bent on setting off alone on a voyage of discovery down the stony slope. Behind them, framed in the darkness of the room beyond, stands the mother, looking on well pleased.

What have the years in store for that young fisherman? Will his grave be here? Will days that are coming see one more stone set up in memory of a sailor lost at sea? Perhaps not. As one of the old captains says, "Boys don't take to the sea now. Going to be artists. Learn to draw and all manner of things." In his time "the schoolmaster was a very different sort from now. He had to be a schoolmaster, land-measurer, pig-killer, all in one. You paid three halfpence a week for learning to read, three halfpence more for learning to write, and then you went to sea. Boys all went to sea at twelve. They had their choice--work or starve." Sailors of his day had rarely even as much schooling as that. He had never, he said, courted but one woman in his life, and that was for another man. He had had so much trouble reading and writing other folks' love-letters that he never had the heart to try it for himself.

Round the Vikings' Seat the children of the village are playing. Hard by, on a tiny stretch of level ground, half-a-dozen boys are intent on some running game--nautical little figures in regulation jerseys; sea boots too, some of them. Where will they be in twenty years? If they are not to man the trawlers of the future there is all the more chance that they will be scattered. If they are not to be fishermen, there is no room for them here. Here there is nothing but the fishing.

And the girls? These laughing, sunny, bright-eyed little flowers of Devon, absorbed in an old-world country game, singing as they play--

"How many miles to London town? Three score ten. Shall us get there by candle light? Oh yes, if your legs are long and straight."

What of the girls? Below there, sleeping in the twilight, is the sea, the cruel, treacherous, hungry sea, destined but too surely to darken the sunshine of their simple lives. That small figure now, that dainty little golden-haired darling, for her what have the years in store? In days to be will she

"... start from her slumber When gusts shake the door?"

"... men must work and women must weep, Though the harbour bar be moaning."

AN OLD CARRONADE.

Half-buried in the soft turf that clothes the rocky brows of a low headland in the West there lies an ancient carronade. It is a quiet spot. There is no sound save the lap of the tide along the shore, the stir of the wind in the long grass, the cry of a sea-gull wheeling over, or now and then the sharp clamour of a troop of daws that flutter round their harbour in the cliff. About it grow great tufts of sea-pink, whose flowers, save here and there a belated bloom or two, have long since gone to seed. But in summer the air is sweetened by the breath of thyme and crowfoot, and at times, from the rocky steeps below, comes the strange smell of blossoming samphire. There is no mark on the old gun. The rust of years has eaten deep into its battered metal. No date remains, no royal cipher. But there is a tradition that it was recovered from the wreck of a Spanish warship that, in the flight of the Armada, went to pieces on this rock-bound coast. In the face of the cliff, a few hundred yards to the westward, there were found embedded, many years ago, some corroded cannon-balls that once might have fitted such a gun as this, but surrounded by so thick a coat of rust that they were increased to nearly four times their original calibre. The gun has at any rate seen some hard fighting. It has been spiked. Some part at least it has played in our rough island story, whether on pirate or privateer, or on one of the unwieldy galleons of the Great Armada. But as it lies here now, deep sunk in its green rest, it is a very emblem of peace and of disarmament.

The tide is at the full, almost "too full for sound or foam;" yet along the broad beach below,

"... where the sand like silver shines, Flows the long, monotonous cadence of its unrhymed lyric lines."

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