Looe is a little place, yet it hums with life quite as loudly, in proportion, as any hive. Carts, all innocent of springs, rattle thunderously up and down its steep and narrow streets and lanes; the voices of them that cry pilchards are heard continually; the noise of the quays and the roar of the waves, the chiming of the Guildhall clock, and the blundering of sea-boots upon cobble-stones, help to swell the noise of as noisy a town for its size as you shall find. There is always, too, the shouting and yeo-ho-ing of the seamen in the harbour, and the tinkle of windlasses echoes all day across Looe River, mingled with the screaming of the sea-gulls in the bay.

As Looe River runs toward the sea, the valley narrows until, in its last hundred yards, it becomes a narrow gorge, with rugged rocks and precipitous hills on either side, and as you stand facing the sea, but a few yards from the diminutive beach, you are in receipt of an effect theatrical in its romantic exaggeration, and instantly your mind is filled with vague visions of the highly coloured nautical scenes long peculiar to the Transpontine Drama, now sacred to the memory of G.P.R. James and T.P. Cooke. The proper complement of this stage-like piece of foreshore would be, you feel certain, a row of footlights, and the eye wanders right and left for the wings, whence should come the virtuous sailor, the Dick Dauntless of the piece, with his Union Jack, pigtail, quid, and hornpipe, all complete; with straw hat, blue jacket, brass-buttoned, and trousers of spotless white; his whiskers curled in ringlets, and his mouth full of plug tobacco and sentiments of the most courageous virtue. He should come on, furiously hitching his slacks as he rolls, rather than walks, upon the boards, waving his Union Jack and brandishing a cutlass—though, how he is to do all this at once with only two hands is more than I can tell you.

You scan the offing for the piratical-looking craft, which, to be in keeping, should be tacking outside the harbour—but isn’t—murmuring to yourself softly the while, “once aboard the lugger;” and your reflections are brought back smartly to everyday matters by the suggestion of a (comparatively) prosaic fisherman that it is a “fine day for a sail.” You look upon the rolling deep, and with misgivings turn sadly away in the direction of the Ship Hotel.

At the “Ship” were many visitors, so for one night we had to lodge out, at the house of a dour, dreary-looking bootmaker. We breakfasted, though, at the hotel, and arrived there in time to find one of the guests conning the sketch-book I had left by misadventure in the coffee-room overnight. The man was all apology and nervousness, and upset a cup of tea over sketch-book and table-cloth. Then he retired confusedly to a couch at the other end of the room, where he immediately sat down on my hat. After this he went out, and probably did some more damage on the cumulative principle.

There are several morals to this pathetic episode, of which undoubtedly the most striking is, “Don’t leave your hat on the sofa.”

They have a visitors’ book at the “Ship,” from which I have culled some examples. The visitors’ book at an hotel is ever my first quest. Its contents, though, are mostly sorry stuff: praises of food supplied, and the moderation of the charges—forms of eulogy particularly distasteful to myself. But let us to our Looe versicles:—

Another:—

But “Captain” Cook did not know his book sufficiently well to know that he had entertained a minor poet unawares. In the Visitors’ Book is the signature of Mr. Edmund Gosse, and the landlord had no recollection of him, although his visit had been, as another poet (minimis!) sings, “only a year ago.”

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