I should still demand the costs I've
been put to. If you bring me the total on Monday--But you know very
well you cannot."

"No, sir."

"Then," said Mr Pamphlett, "we waste time. I have been worried
enough, these last few days, with more serious business than yours.
In the times now upon us a many folk are bound to go to the wall; and
the improvident will go first, as is only right. Enough said, my
man!"

Nicky-Nan fumbled with the knife in his pocket, but let Mr Pamphlett
pass.

Then he limped back to the house that would be his until Monday, and
closed the door. Beyond the frail partition which boarded him off
from the Penhaligon family he could hear the children merry at tea.

CHAPTER II.

CALL TO ARMS.

NESCIO QUA NATALE SOLUM DULCEDINE CUNCTOS
DUCIT ET IMMEMORES NON SINIT ESSE SUI.

--The Old Doctor (to whom we have made allusion) had been moved to
write an account of his native place, and had contrived to get it
published by subscription in a thin octavo volume of 232 pages,
measuring nine by five and a half inches. Copies are rare, but may
yet be picked up on secondhand bookstalls for six or seven shillings.

From this 'History of Polpier' I must quote--being unable to better
it--his description of the little town. (He ever insisted in calling
it a town, not a village, although it contained less than fourteen
hundred inhabitants.)

"If the map of the coast of Cornwall be examined, on the
south-east, between the estuaries of the two rivers that divide
the Hundred of West from the Hundred of East and the Hundred of
Powder, will be noticed an indentation of the littoral line, in
which cleft lies the little town of Polpier. Tall hills,
abrupt and rugged, shut in a deep and tortuous valley, formed
by the meeting of smaller coombs; houses, which seem dropped
rather than built, crowd the valley and its rocky ledges; a
rapid rivulet dances in and out among the dwellings, till its
voice is lost in the waters of a tidal haven, thronged with
fishing boats and guarded by its Peak of serried rock."

The Doctor after this first modest mention of "a rivulet" invariably
writes of it as "the River," and by no other name does Polpier speak
of it to this day. On the lower or seaward side of the bridge-end,
where the channel measures some three yards across, the flank of his
house leaned over the rushing water, to the sound of