ronzed his face, and from his talk I
learnt that he had already seen half the Duchy, in seven days. Yet he
had been unreasonably delayed in at least a dozen places, and used the
strongest language about 'bus and coach communication, local trains,
misleading sign-posts, and the like. Our scenery enraptured him--every
aspect of it. He had travelled up the Tamar to Launceston, crossed
the moors, climbing Roughtor and Brown Willy on his way, plunged down
towards Camelford, which he appeared to have reached by following two
valleys simultaneously, coached to Boscastle, walked to Tintagel,
climbed up to Uther's Castle, diverged inland to St. Nectan's Kieve,
driven on to Bedruthan Steps, Mawgan, the Vale of Lanherne, Newquay,
taken a train thence to Truro, a steamer from Truro to Falmouth,
crossed the ferry to St. Mawes, walked up the coast to Mevagissey,
driven from Mevagissey to St. Austell, and at St. Austell taken
another train for Troy. This brought half his holiday to a close: the
remaining half he meant to devote to the Mining District, St. Ives,
the Land's End, St. Michael's Mount, the Lizard, and perhaps the
Scilly Isles.

Then I began to feel that I lived in a nook, and to wonder how I could
spin out its attractions to cover a whole day: for I could not hear to
think of his departing with secret regret for his lavished time. In
a flash I saw the truth; that my love for this spot is built up of
numberless trivialities, of small memories all incommunicable, or
ridiculous when communicated; a scrap of local speech heard at this
corner, a pleasant native face remembered in that doorway, a battered
vessel dropping anchor--she went out in the spring with her crew
singing dolefully; and the grey-bearded man waiting in his boat
beneath her counter till the custom-house officers have made their
survey is the father of one among the crew, and is waiting to take
his son's hand again, after months of absence. Would this interest my
friend, if I pointed it out to him? Or, if I walk with him by the path
above the creek, what will he care to know that on this particular
bank the violets always bloom earliest--that one of a line of
yews that top the churchyard wall is remarkable because a pair of
missel-thrushes have chosen it to build in for three successive years?
The violets are gone. The empty nest has almost dissolved under the
late heavy rains, and the yew is so like its fellows that I myself
have no idea why the birds chose