exposed positions, as though the roaring sea-winds, which cut off all other vegetation, favored and nourished it, but waved its triumphant pennant upon walls and house-tops.  Stony places have a special attraction for this weed; and it takes root so readily that the story of its importation into Gethin might have had more foundation in fact than some other local legends equally credited.  Only a few years back the plant had been unknown there, but a wagoner of the place, on his return journey, had plucked a sprig of it in some locality where it grew, to serve the purpose of a whip; and, when he reached home, had thrown it carelessly on the top of an earthen wall, where it had struck root, and multiplied.

The cliffs, and the sea, and, above all, the ruined castle upon the rock, were the sole attractions then which Gethin possessed—­and that they did attract was an unceasing subject of wonder to its inhabitants.  Whatever could the fine folk see in a heap of stones or a waste of water, to bring them there for hundreds of miles, was a mystery unexplained; but the villagers were no more unwilling than professional spiritualists to take a practical advantage of the Inexplicable.  In the winter they reaped the harvest of the sea, or explored the bowels of the earth; in the summer they transformed themselves into “guides,” and set up curiosity-shops of shells and minerals; while, to supply accommodation to the increasing throng of Visitors, John Trevethick, who had always a keen eye for profit, had leased the village beer-house, and enlarged it to the dimensions of a respectable inn.  Even now, however, the house exhibited a curious ignorance or disregard of the tastes of those for whose use it was built—­the windows of all its sitting-rooms opened upon the straggling street, while the glorious prospect of cliff and ocean which it commanded behind was totally ignored.  Thus Richard Yorke found himself located in an apartment which, though otherwise tolerably comfortable, might as well have been in Bloomsbury for the view which it afforded.  The walls were ornamented by colored pictures of the Royal Exchange and of the Thames Tunnel, London; and upon the mantel-piece was an equestrian figure (in china) of Field-marshal the Duke of Wellington as he appears upon the arch of Constitution Hill.  The only attempt at “local coloring” was found in the book-case—­composed of two boards and a cat’s cradle—­in which three odd volumes of the “Tales of the Castle” had been placed, no doubt with reference to the grand old ruin whose tottering walls beckoned “the quality” to Gethin.

His simple meal of bacon and eggs having been dispatched, and gratitude failing to invest with interest the lean pigs that searched in vain for cabbage-stalks, or the dyspeptic fowls that were moulting digestive pebbles in the street without, Richard lit a cigar, and prepared to saunter forth.  The fog had vanished; all the sky was blue and bright.  The keen and gusty air increased in him that elasticity of spirit with which luncheon at all stages of their life-journey inspires mankind.