g, they bore him no ill-will
because he wouldn't drink--they would buy his drawing, and one of the
commercial gentlemen, who was a stationer, would publish a hundred, two
hundred, five hundred, a thousand copies of it, on sheets of
letter-paper, price one penny! What had I got to say to that?--If that
wasn't hospitality, what the devil was?"

All this might have been very amusing, and our new friends might have
proved excellent companions, under a different set of circumstances.
But, as things were, we neither of us felt at all sorry when their
manners subsequently exhibited a slight change, under the influence of
further potations of porter. Soon, they began to look stolid and
suspicious--suddenly, they discovered that we were not quite such good
company as they had thought us at first--finally, they took their
departure in solemn silence, leaving us free at last to mount the hill,
and look out uninterruptedly on the glorious view from the summit, which
extended over a circumference of a hundred miles.

Turning our faces towards the north-east, and standing now on the
topmost rock of one of the most elevated situations in Cornwall, we were
able to discern the sea on either side of us. Two faint lines of the
softest, haziest blue, indicated the Bristol Channel on the one hand,
and the English Channel on the other. Before us lay a wide region of
downs and fields, all mapped out in every variety of form by their
different divisions of wall and hedge-row--while, farther away yet,
darker and more indefinite, appeared the Dartmoor forest and the
Dartmoor hills. It was just that hour before the evening, at which the
atmosphere acquires a more mellow purity, a more perfect serenity and
warmth, than at earlier periods of the day. The shadows of great clouds
lay in vast lovely shapes of purple blue over the whole visible tract of
country, contrasting in exquisite beauty with the sunny glimpses of
landscape shining between them. Beneath us, the picturesque confusion of
rocks, topped by the quaint form of the Cheese-Wring, seemed to fade
away mysteriously into the grass of the moorland; beyond which, high up
where the hills rose again, a little lake, called Dosmery Pool, shone in
the sunlight with dazzling, diamond brightness. In the opposite
direction, towards the west, the immediate prospect was formed by the
rugged granite ridges, towering one behind the other, of Sharp Torr and
Kilmarth--the long hazy outlines of the plains a