m that of many old country houses. There were one or two great rooms,
a multitude of family portraits, and landscapes, marbles and coins
brought from Italy by a traveled and dilettante ancestor. It was a great
rendezvous for numerous Buller relations. It was, as was the parsonage
also, a nest of old domestics, all born in the parish, and it included
among its other inmates a ghost, who was called "the Countess," and who
took from time to time alarming strolls along the passages.

It remains to add a word or two with regard to Cockington Court. At the
time when my father was born in it, it was the heart of a neighborhood
remotely and even primitively rural, and fifty years later, when I can
first remember it, its immediate surroundings were unchanged. A few
miles away the modern world had, indeed, begun to assert itself in the
multiplying villas of Torquay, but on the Cockington property, which
includes the district of Chelston, few dwellings existed which had not
been there in the days of Charles II. Torquay, which at the beginning of
the Napoleonic wars was nothing more than a cluster of fishermen's huts,
owed its rise to the presence of the British fleet in Torbay, and the
need of accommodation on shore for officers' wives and families. My
grandfather built two houses, Livermead House and Livermead Cottage, in
answer to this demand. Both were for personal friends, one of them
being the first Lord St. Vincent, the other being Sir John Colbourne,
afterward Lord Seaton. But though elaborate plans were subsequently put
before him for turning the surrounding slopes into a pretentious and
symmetrical watering place, the construction of no new residence was
permitted by himself or his successor till somewhere about the year
1865, when a building lease was granted by the latter to one of his own
connections.

Meanwhile, on adjacent properties, belonging to the Palks and Carys,
Torquay had been developing into what became for a time the most famous
and fashionable of the winter resorts of England, Cockington still
remaining a quiet and undisturbed Arcadia.

But the real or nominal progress of five-and-forty years has brought
about changes which my grandfather, blind to his own interests,
resisted. To-day, as the train, having passed the station of Torre,
proceeds toward that of Paignton, the traveler sees, looking inland at
the Cockington and Chelston slopes, a throng of villas intermixed with
the relics of ancient hedgerows