on market-days, and noisy with buyers and sellers, it is a scene of
bustle and movement which would arouse the enthusiasm of a traveller if
he came upon it in some distant city of the East, though the difference
of language and costume is all there is between the two. But when it is
empty, with its bare walls and bare floor and high dark roof, sun and
shadow make from it a beauty which it is worth a moment's pause and
stepping aside to see.

The Athenaeum, also, which stands in the open space at the head of the
Long Bridge, which is a noble structure of the thirteenth century, is a
modern building, endowed by the late Mr. Rock, and possessing one of the
best libraries in Devonshire. It is a plain, unpretentious building; on
the ground-floor a geological museum, very useful for a student--for it
contains a complete collection of Devonian rocks and fossils--and the
library upstairs. Sitting there on a summer afternoon, and seeing
through the open windows the smooth sunlit curve of the river below, and
the gentle slope of wooded hills beyond, the Athenaeum has a charm--that
charm of weather and daily custom--which architectural description fails
to convey for any building, whether it is the Parthenon or a farm-house.
Without it, places lack their intimate personality, as photographs lack
the personality of men and women. My memory of the Athenaeum Library is
of the familiar, slightly musty smell of books, of the faint creaking of
the librarian's boots, and the hum of bees and the whirr of a mowing
machine, of the smell of an early summer afternoon, the white glare of
the North Walk stretching beside the river, and the reflection of
anchored boats, very perfect on the still water.

Barnstaple is a very ancient borough; it is spoken of in the Devonshire
Domesday as one of the four "burghs" of Devon, and as early as the reign
of Henry I, before the election of Mayors had become part of English
municipal life, it was entitled to elect a chief magistrate for its own
government. It was a fortified place under the Saxon Kings, and a large
grass-grown mound in the centre of the town (near the town station) marks
the site of Athelstan's castle. Athelstan is supposed to have come to
Barnstaple in the early tenth century, when he was engaged in driving the
British out of Devonshire, beyond the River Tamar, which marks the
boundary between Devon and Cornwall for the greater part; and this was
only done by him, Westcote affirms