adow. Closer yet, on the mainland, a
few cattle were feeding quietly on a long strip of meadow bordering the
edge of the cliff; and, now and then, a gull soared up from the sea, and
wheeled screaming over our heads. The faint sound of the small
shore-waves (invisible to us in the position we occupied) beating dull
and at long intervals on the beach, augmented the dreary solemnity of
the evening prospect. Light, shade, and colour, were all before us,
arranged in the grandest combinations, and expressed by the simplest
forms. If Michael Angelo had painted landscape, he might have
represented such a scene as we now beheld.

This was our last excursion at Looe. The next morning we were again on
the road, walking inland on our way to the town of Liskeard.

III.

HOLY WELLS AND DRUID RELICS.

Fresh from the quaint old houses, the delightfully irregular streets,
and the fragrant terrace-gardens of Looe, we found ourselves, on
entering Liskeard, suddenly introduced to that "abomination of
desolation," a large agricultural country town. Modern square houses,
barren of all outer ornament; wide, dusty, deserted streets;
misanthropical-looking shopkeepers, clad in rusty black, standing at
their doors to gaze on the solitude around them--greeted our eyes on all
sides. Such samples of the population as we accidentally encountered
were not promising. We were unlucky enough to remark, in the course of
two streets, a nonagenarian old woman with a false nose, and an idiot
shaking with the palsy.

But harder trials were in reserve for us. We missed the best of the many
inns at Liskeard, and went to the very worst. What a place was our house
of public entertainment for a great sinner to repent in, or for a
melancholy recluse to retreat to! Not a human being appeared in the
street where this tavern of despair frowned amid congenial desolation.
Nobody welcomed us at the door--the sign creaked dolefully, as the wind
swung it on its rusty hinges. We walked in, and discovered a
low-spirited little man sitting at an empty "bar," and hiding himself,
as it were, from all mortal inspection behind the full sheet of a dirty
provincial newspaper. Doleful was our petition to this secluded publican
for shelter and food; and doubly doleful was his answer to our appeal.
Beds he believed he had--food there was none in the house, saving a
piece of _corned beef_, which the family had dined on, and which he
proposed that we should partake of bef