. If, alighting at Torquay station, he
mounts the hill above it by what in my childhood was a brambled and
furtive lane, he will find on either side of him villas and villa
gardens, till at length he is brought to a ridge overlooking a secluded
valley. For some distance villas will still obscure his view, but
presently these end. Below him he will see steep fields descending into
a quiet hollow, the opposite slopes being covered or crowned with woods,
and against them he will see smoke wreaths straying upward from
undiscerned chimneys. A little farther on, the road, now wholly rural,
dips downward, and Cockington village reveals itself, not substantially
changed, with its thatch and its red mud walls, from what it had been
more than two hundred years ago. Its most prominent feature is the
blacksmith's forge, which, unaltered except for repairs, is of much
greater antiquity. It is said that, as a contrast between the old world
and the new, few scenes in England have been more often photographed
than this. Passing the blacksmith's forge, and mounting under the shade
of trees, the road leads to a lodge, the grounds of Cockington Court,
and the church which very nearly touches it.

The house as it now stands--a familiar object to tourists--is merely a
portion of what once was a larger structure. It was partly built by the
Carys in the year of the Spanish Armada. Roger Mallock reconstructed it
some seventy years later. It formed in his days, and up to those of my
grandfather, one side of a square, entered between two towers, and was
surrounded by a deer park of four or five hundred acres. Toward the end
of the eighteenth century, however, agricultural land then rising in
value, my grandfather, who threw away one fortune by refusing to have a
town on his property, had been shrewd enough to get rid of his deer,
and turned most of his parkland into farms. He also destroyed the
forecourt of his house and a range of antique offices, considerably
reducing at the same time the size of the main building by depriving it
of its top story and substituting a dwarfish parapet for what had once
been its eight gables. The interior suffered at his hands to an even
greater extent. A hall with a minstrels' gallery was turned by him into
several rooms as commonplace as it is possible to imagine. Indeed little
of special interest survived him but some fine Italian ceilings, the
most curious of which exists no longer, a paneled dining-room of the