I made his acquaintance in 188-, had for thirty
years been vicar of the coast-parish of Lansulyan. He had come to it
almost fresh from Oxford, a young scholar with a head full of Greek,
having accepted the living from his old college as a step towards
preferment. He was never to be offered another. Lansulyan parish is a
wide one in acreage, and the stipend exiguous even for a bachelor. From
the first the Parson eked out his income by preparing small annotated
editions of the Classics for the use of Schools and by taking occasional
pupils, of whom in 188- I was the latest. He could not teach me
scholarship, which is a habit of mind; but he could, and in the end did,
teach me how to win a scholarship, which is a sum of money paid
annually. I have therefore a practical reason for thinking of him with
gratitude: and I believe he liked me, while despising my Latinity and
discommending my precociousness with tobacco.

His pupils could never complain of distraction. The church-town--a
single street of cottages winding round a knoll of elms which hide the
Vicarage and all but the spire of St. Julian's Church--stands high and a
mile back from the coast, and looks straight upon the Menawhidden reef,
a fringe of toothed rocks lying parallel with the shore and half a mile
distant from it. This reef forms a breakwater for a small inlet where
the coombe which runs below Lansulyan meets the sea. Follow the road
downhill from the church-town and along the coombe, and you come to a
white-washed fishing haven, with a life-boat house and short sea-wall.
The Porth is its only name. On the whole, if one has to live in
Lansulyan parish the Porth is gayer than the church-town, where from the
Vicarage windows you look through the trees southward upon ships moving
up or down Channel in the blue distance and the white water girdling
Menawhidden; northward upon downs where herds of ponies wander at will
between the treeless farms, and a dun-coloured British earthwork tops
the high sky-line. Dwellers among these uplands, wringing their
livelihood from the obstinate soil by labour which never slackens, year
in and year out, from Monday morning to Saturday night, are properly
despised by the inhabitants of the Porth, who sit half their time
mending nets, cultivating the social graces, and waiting for the harvest
which they have not sown to come floating past their doors.
By consequence, if a farmer wishes to learn the spiciest gossip about