Judge of our surprise when we found this morning that Veryan was not upon the sea, but over a mile removed from it. We had carelessly noted Veryan Bay marked on the map, and thus concluded that of course the village of the same name was seated beside the sea. We left our inn and Veryan with our pockets filled with the apples our kindly hostess pressed upon us at parting. My hostess, I salute you!

All through this day we wandered blunderingly, as if we had been chartless. Certainly, when the maps deal with such little-travelled districts as this, they become utterly untrustworthy for by-roads, and are only to be followed with suspicion for the highways. We set out for Truro, and at the outset were seduced from the narrow path by the tempting clusters of blackberries that hung upon the hedges of a hillside field. This led us at length upon the hamlet of Treworlas, a few scattered houses set down upon the edges of a golden moor, free to every breeze that blows, where the winds beat upon the walls of the cottages and shook them, and fluttered the feathers of the scurrying geese that patched the gold of the gorse and the green of the grass with moving patches of white. There was a house to let here, an empty house, with garden all overgrown with weeds, and a bill swinging in the window by one corner; not at all an undesirable little place—for a hermit. We inquired the rent of it—£5 per annum. Just the place for retirement from one’s kind: the ideal retreat for one crossed in love or soured by failure, or for the naturally misanthropical; we bear it in mind, for, though we are none of these, yet a time may come! From here we went on to Philleigh, a village that stands on a tongue of land pushing out into the salt-water Fal, where Ruan Creek sends spreading watery fingers between the hills. Steep, rain-washed roads, unkempt and deep rutted, lead down to the water, and a homely inn, with flaunting linen hanging out to dry, and gobbling ducks scavenging among the cart-tracks, wears a name remarkably poetic—The Roseland Inn. A forest of thick-growing, stunted oaks leads to the steam ferry at Trelissick, where the Fal winds between lovely woods that grow down to the water’s edge, and dip their branches in the stream. We crossed here mistakenly, thinking it to be King Harry Passage, and thus missing a sight of Tregothnan, Lord Falmouth’s country seat, famed in all the country round about for the charm of its situation.

As the afternoon wore on to tea-time, we came into Truro, along a broad and surprisingly well-kept highway. But never a sight was there of the city until we had reached the hillside, where its outskirts of villas straggle into the country, detached and semi-detached, with lawns and flower-beds and gravel-paths, ah! so neat and clean-swept, all of them bearing the most high-falutin’ names. Truro is folded away from distant sight, in between the hills, where the Fal ceases its navigable course.

Truro is admirably situated, but the city does not do justice to its site. Its buildings, substantial and enduring enough, since they are built of granite, are commonplace in design, and their tameness of outline is a weariness to the spirit, save, indeed, some modern commercial structures that savour of architecture; but to mention these by name in this place would be to incur suspicion of advertisement. We came into the city down Lemon Street, past the melancholy statue of Lander the explorer, standing atop of his Doric pillar, and were disappointed on the instant of entering it by these things, and by the colour-scheme of the place—a heavy grey, unrelieved by brick or other stone than native granite. The prevailing stoniness continued even in the roadways, paved with granite setts.

Truro is now a cathedral city, with a cathedral in course of construction in its midst. Already the choir and the transepts are completed and consecrated, so we may form some idea of what the building will eventually look like. Its style is Early English, singularly refined and symmetrically ordered as regards the interior, but “exteriorly”—as architectural slang hath it—it has an appearance at once cramped and overladen with ornament of too minute a character, and is “picturesque” with a studied ready-made quaintness that does a hurt to the dignity of such a building. This irregularity of external details, and the whimsical incidence of turret and spirelet, belong, properly, not to an original building, but should be the outcome of generations of alteration and addition, grafted by the varying tastes of posterity upon a well-balanced design. Perhaps it was necessary for the winning of the competition for the architect to send in a showy elevation that should take the eyes of a committee, and in this Mr. Pearson succeeded, but he has failed to satisfy a reasonable demand for dignity and repose to the outward view.

The cathedral will be 300 feet in length, with two western towers and a central spire. Its site, though central, is somewhat unfortunate, because hemmed closely with the surrounding houses of High Cross. It was the site of the old Church of Saint Mary, which became of cathedral rank on the establishment of the Truro diocese in 1877, but was demolished in favour of the new scheme, saving its south aisle, retained and incorporated with the new building.

It was while I was sketching the cathedral from a point of vantage in the High Street, surrounded, meanwhile, by an intensely interested crowd of boys, that a stranger, apologising for the interruption, came up and asked me if I would mind going with him to his house, and giving an opinion as to the genuineness of a reputed Reynolds painting he had bought for some few shillings. The picture proved to be a sorry daub; but none the less for the adverse opinion, Mr. —— proved very friendly, and, as he was driving to Redruth that evening, invited self and friend to accompany him at an appointed time.