ine rain" often lasted for a fortnight. Sometimes we passed little
villages built in damp holes, where trees, cottages, women scampering
backwards and forwards peevishly on domestic errands, big boys with
empty sacks over their heads and shoulders, gossiping gloomily against
barn walls, and ill-conditioned pigs grunting for admission at closed
kitchen doors, all looked soaked through and through together. Nothing,
in short, could be more dreary and comfortless than our walk for the
first two hours. But, after that, as we approached "Lizard Town," the
clouds began to part to seaward; layer after layer of mist drove past
us, rolling before the wind; peeps of faint greenish-blue sky appeared
and enlarged apace. By the time we had arrived at our destination, a
white, watery sunlight was falling over the wet landscape. The
prognostications of our Cornish friends were pleasantly falsified. A
fine day was in store for us after all.

The man who first distinguished the little group of cottages that we now
looked on, by the denomination of Lizard _Town_, must have possessed
magnificent ideas indeed on the subject of nomenclature. If the place
looked like anything in the world, it looked like a large collection of
farm out-buildings without a farm-house. Muddy little lanes intersecting
each other at every possible angle; rickety little cottages turned about
to all the points of the compass; ducks, geese, cocks, hens, pigs, cows,
horses, dunghills, puddles, sheds, peat-stacks, timber, nets, seemed to
be all indiscriminately huddled together where there was little or no
room for them. To find the inn amid this confusion of animate and
inanimate objects, was no easy matter; and when we at length discovered
it, pushed our way through the live stock in the garden, and opened the
kitchen door, this was the scene which burst instantaneously on our
view:--

We beheld a small room literally full of babies, and babies' mothers.
Interesting infants of the tenderest possible age, draped in long
clothes and short clothes, and shawls and blankets, met the eye
wherever it turned. We saw babies propped up uncomfortably on the
dresser, babies rocking snugly in wicker cradles, babies stretched out
flat on their backs on women's knees, babies prone on the floor toasting
before a slow fire. Every one of these Cornish cherubs was crying in
every variety of vocal key. Every one of their affectionate parents was
talking at the top of her voice. Every