or weather, some inveterate
loungers who would wander up and down in spite of the rain, and three
unhappy German musicians, who had been caught on their travels, and
pinned up tight against the outer wall of a house, in a sort of cage of
canvas, boards, and evergreens, which hid every part of them but their
heads and shoulders. Nobody interfered to release these unfortunates.
There they sat, hemmed in all round by dripping leaves, blowing grimly
and incessantly through instruments of brass. If the reader can imagine
the effect of three phlegmatic men with long bottle noses, looking out
of a circle of green bushes, and playing waltzes unintermittingly on
long horns, in a heavy shower--he will be able to form a tolerably
correct estimate of the large extra proportion of gloom which the German
musicians succeeded in infusing into the disastrous proceedings of the
day.

The tea-drinking was rather more successful. The room in which it was
held was filled to the corners, and exhaled such an odour of wet
garments and bread and butter (to say nothing of an incessant clatter of
china and bawling of voices) that we found ourselves, as uninitiated
strangers, unequal to the task of remaining in it to witness the
proceedings. Descending the steps which led into the street from the
door--to the great confusion of a string of smartly dressed ladies who
encountered us, rushing up with steaming teakettles and craggy lumps of
plumcake--we left the inhabitants to conclude their festivities by
themselves, and went out to take a farewell walk on the cliffs of Looe.

We ascended the heights to the westward, losing sight of the town among
the trees as we went; and then, walking in a southerly direction through
some cornfields, approached within a few hundred yards of the edge of
the cliffs, and looked out on the sea. The sky had partially cleared,
and the rain had ceased; but huge fantastic masses of cloud, tinged with
lurid copper-colour by the setting sun, still towered afar off over the
horizon, and were reflected in a deeper hue on the calm surface of the
sea, with a perfectness and grandeur that I never remember to have
witnessed before. Not a ship was in sight; but out on the extreme line
of the wilderness of grey waters there shone one red, fiery spark--the
beacon of the Eddystone Lighthouse. Before us, the green fields of Looe
Island rose high out of the ocean--here, partaking the red light on the
clouds; there, half lost in cold sh