Mevagissey bears a great resemblance to Polperro. It stands at the bottom of a deep valley leading out into the sea, and has a little harbour, built in much the same fashion. When the tide is out and the harbour dry, the reek of fish-offal is just like that of Polperro, but (if possible) a trifle stronger and more essential. When the cholera visited Mevagissey in 1849, the inhabitants fled the place, and encamped on the hill-tops, the fishermen lying on board their smacks in Fowey Haven. One wonders how the Fowey folk liked it. Some few years ago a new granite pier was completed to form a southern arm to the harbour at Mevagissey. It cost £25,000, and the next storm punched a great hole in the middle of it, carrying away about half of the entire structure, and rendering the remainder not only useless but dangerous. It will cost £30,000 to set all right again.

At mid-day we set off by the coast, making for Veryan. We passed Porthmellin, a lonely cove, and then the road lay inland to a village with the Irish-like name of Gorran, a diminutive outlandish place, with an immense church, and a churchyard where whole generations of villagers are buried by families, each family to its own particular plot of ground, as it seemed. Half a mile to the south, in a rocky bay of the smallest dimensions, is the picturesque and delightful village of Gorran Haven, a feast of colour, even for Cornwall, so rich in sapphire seas, golden sands, and brilliantly lichened rocks. The sands were littered with lobster-pots, and a long row of bronzed and blue-jerseyed fishermen sat on an interminable bench, and blinked in the late afternoon sun. We stayed awhile and talked with them. Before we set off again for Veryan, we asked a fisherman how far it was, for we had given up all our faith in distances, as measured on our Reduced Ordnance Map. “Seven mile,” said he, “but you’re not going to walk there to-night?”

We assured him that such was our intention, and stepped out briskly along a road that wound in and out, and narrowed and broadened again in a curious manner, passing lonely little chapels set in the wildest of wildernesses.

As we came in view of St. Michael Caerhayes, seen afar off from high ground, we had before us the loveliest of evening effects. The colour of the sky ranged from deepest blue, through scarlets and flaming yellows, to a delicate puce. Great and heavy masses of woodland lay below at the rear of a castellated mansion, whose park-like lands stretched down to the very verge of a miniature bay, guarded by headlands of a diminutive cragginess. Between them lay a view of the open Channel, with the coast-line terminating in the abrupt wall of Deadman’s Head, and the sunlight struck full upon the water with a dazzle as of molten gold. We decided that Saint Michael Caerhayes was decidedly the place for a night’s rest. But when we had descended into the valley, and thence up the road on the other side, and found no village, we began to have misgivings. A belated countryman whom we passed as the sun went down informed us that Saint Michael Caerhayes was half a mile farther on, and so we were reassured. We walked half a mile, and passed, perhaps, six cottages, but never an inn. Something tall and black loomed up in the now darkened sky. It was the church tower, and again we felt that our day’s journey was nearly done, for it is generally found that church and village inn are very near neighbours. But here the church stood solitary; not a house of any kind near it, and beyond it mere vagueness. We retraced our steps, and asked a contemplative youth, who sat astride a gate, where the village inn was. There was none! We had passed all there was of the village! Now our courage oozed away, and all pride with it. Could he (we asked) tell us where we might chance to get a night’s lodging? He would inquire, he said, and we followed him meekly. Inquiries were fruitless here; we were sent away with scant ceremony. At the lodge gates of the lordly mansion we had seen earlier we halted on our weary way, and asked if possibly we could be recommended to some resting-place. We had some faint hopes that they would take compassion upon us here, but the lodge-keeper, who pondered her head vainly to answer our question satisfactorily, made no offer. There was nothing for it, then, but to walk on to Veryan.

Night shut down impenetrable on the moorlands, and darkness brushed our faces as we plunged into the unknown from the inhospitable hamlet of Saint Michael Caerhayes. Civilisation became an unmeaning term, or if aught of significance the word yet retained, it left in the chambers of the mind a satiric tang; for the steep paths, rocky, winding, and altogether insignificant, upon which we presently fared to the seaboard, seemed rather fortuitous than planned, and an emphatic comment upon primary conditions, rather than a subdual of them.

It was the booming of the surf hundreds of feet below us that advised our coming upon the sea, and cottage windows, two or three, shining in glow-worm fashion, showed us where lay Port Holland, deep-set at the seaward end of a valley, where the unseen waves spent their force amid sands and stones, with a long-drawn sighing a-h-h-h, a-h-h-h.

To Port Holland instantly succeeded Saint Lo, in another bight—both wild, lonely, and (for us tourists, at least) shelterless. We spoke with two formless concentrations of blackness, who knew naught of accommodation for strangers, and readily (nay, with alacrity) gave us good night. Then we, with what cheer we might, to climb the road that now ascended inland the western side of a valley, moist and teeming with nocturnal life, that rustled and ran among the brake and underwood, and chirped and squeaked as our straying feet sent fragments of stone and rock rolling into its ferny lairs.

And now, on this solitary road, we lost our way at an occult forking of the path, uncharted by any finger-post. We felt assured of it as we walked on for miles, and the road wound round and about with never another sign of the sea, which should have been within hearing. At length the road forked again, with a sign-post set in a hedge at the angle. We had no matches; the hedge forbade any near approach to the finger-board.

For all the use it was, the sign-post need not have existed. After we had taken what looked the most likely road, and after another mile had been tramped, we came to another and more promising affair, which, we found, directed us, in the way we were going, to Grampound, a place we had not the remotest idea of visiting. There was nothing for it but to turn about and retrace our steps. This we did, and presently met some country folk. We could have embraced them, so long was it since we had seen any fellow-creatures, but we refrained, and merely asked the road and the distance to Veryan. Four and a half miles farther, it seemed.

With what haste and with how many more wrong turnings we pursued our way I will not speak.

We reached that village eventually, and only just before closing time. The windows of the one inn that Veryan possesses streamed brightly into the road as we fearfully crossed the threshold, and doubtfully begged (that is the word) a lodging for the night, and a meal to go to bed upon. I cannot call to mind the sign of that inn, but I have not forgotten the name of Mrs. Mason, our hostess. That were inexcusable, for surely no one could have been kinder to wearied wayfarers than she. We had tea (a high tea, to be sure) at that hour of night, and tea that night seemed ambrosia fit for gods. What a delightful tea that was! Cornish cream, new bread, apricot jam, and a mysteriously delicious preserve, whose name we never knew, but whose savour remains a fond and fast memory. And while tea progressed, we had music from the bar-parlour on the other side of the passage. Some one played upon a violin, and the airs he played were old sea-songs, that were new when Dibdin wrote, and popular when British sailors wore pig-tails, and fought the Frenchman and the Spaniard from youth to age; times when every man had his fill of fighting, and the stomach for it, too. So it befell that, even with that crazy fiddle and that unfinished performer, the songs he played were melodies that went straight to the heart, even as they originally came from that seat of a throbbing patriotism; tunes that made the pulses dance, the eyes to sparkle, and the cheek to flush. We have no need for such songs now, for we meet no foreign foe to-day. No storms rend the branches of the oak: the tree, alas! is rotting at the heart. Ah! the pity, the misery of it.