ed with
laughter; laughter which I deprecate, while setting down as an
impartial chronicler the occasion and the cause of it.

You must know that our venerable and excellent squire, Sir Felix
Felix-Williams, has for some years felt our little town getting, as
he puts it, 'beyond him.' He remembers, in his father's time, the
grass growing in our streets. The few vessels that then visited the
port brought American timber-props for the mines out of which the
Felix-Williams estate drew its royalties, and shipped in exchange
small cargoes of emigrants whom, for one reason or another, that
estate was unable to support. It was a simple system, and Sir Felix
has often in talk with me lamented its gradual strangulation, in his
time, by the complexities of modern commerce.--You should hear, by
the way, Sir Felix pronounce that favourite phrase of his 'in my
time'; he does it with a dignified humility, as who should say,
'Observe, I am of the past indeed, but I have lent my name to an
epoch.'

As a fact the access of a railway to our little port, the building of
jetties for the china-clay trade, the development of our harbour
which now receives over 300,000 tons of shipping annually--all these
have, in ways direct and indirect, more than doubled the old
gentleman's income. But to do him justice, he regards this scarcely
at all. He sets it down--and rightly--to what he has taken to call
on public occasions 'the expansion of our Imperial Greatness'; but in
his heart of hearts he regrets his loosening hold on a population
that was used to sit under his fig-tree and drink of his cistern.
With their growth the working classes have come to prefer self-help
to his honest regulation of their weal. There has been no quarrel:
we all love Sir Felix and respect him, though now and then we laugh
at him a good deal.

There has been no quarrel, I repeat. But insensibly we have lost the
first place in his affections, which of late years have concentrated
themselves more and more upon the small village of Kirris-vean,
around a corner of the coast. By its mere beauty, indeed, any one
might be excused for falling in love with Kirris-vean. It lies,
almost within the actual shadow of Sir Felix's great house, at the
foot of a steep wooded coombe, and fronts with diminutive beach and
pier the blue waters of our neighbouring bay. The cottages are
whitewashed and garlanded with jasmine, solanum, the monthly rose.
Fuchsias bloom in their fro