or, more properly, a curiosity;
for there are no traces of the most enterprising approaching the matter
from a commercial standpoint. "There is on the rocks at low-water a
species of limpet which contains a liquor very curious for marking fine
linen," says our seventeenth-century authority, and he gives directions
for breaking the mollusc "with one sharp blow," and taking out "by a
bodkin" the little white vein that lies transversely by the head--a
somewhat delicate operation. "The letters and figures made with this
liquor on linen," he continues, "will appear of a light green colour,
and, if placed in the sun, will change into the following colours: if
in winter about noon, if in summer an hour or two after sun-rising and
so much before setting, for in the heat of the day in summer it will
come on so fast that the succession of each colour will scarcely be
distinguished.

"Next to the first light green it will appear of a deep green, and in a
few minutes change to a full sea-green; after which it will alter to a
blue, then to a purplish-red; after which, lying an hour or two (if the
sun shines) it will be of a deep purple-red, beyond which the sun does
no more. But this last beautiful colour, after washing in scalding
soap and water, will, on being laid out to dry, be a fair bright
crimson which will abide all future washing."

Is this indeed the "murex," as Browning calls it, of the Tyrian purple,
which can be found on the Minehead rocks at low-tide by the
holiday-makers of our day?--that "purple dye" for which, the weary
Roman usurper said,

"We'll stain the robe again from clasp to hem
With blood of friends and kinsmen . . .,"

and yet which is only

"Crushed from a shellfish, that the fisherman
Brings up in hundreds, yet rejects as food."

In coming to Dunster we come to the last of the many beautiful places
that lie within the compass of this fifty miles of England, places with
so varied a loveliness that nowhere else, I think, can you match with
them.

There is Barnstaple, suave and clean and sunny, with its well-kept
streets and smooth, broad river, and its air of all prosperity and
peace, the very type and pattern of a decent English country-town; and
almost within stone's throw of it the moors begin, lying widely under
the expanse of the sky, with the perpetual running of waters, and the
lonely farms, from which the smoke curls up, blue against the brown
hillside. There are the sombre a