It was a cool grey day, with a haze over the sea, the gusty sky of yesterday having hardened into delicate flakes of pearly cloud, like the sand on some wave-beaten beach.  It was all infinitely soft and refreshing to the eye, that outspread pastoral landscape, seen in a low dusk, like the dusk of a winter dawn.

It was then that in a little hollow to our right we saw the old House of Pengersick—­what a grim, lean, hungry sort of name!  We made our way down along a little road, the big worn flints standing up out of the gravel, by brakes of bramble, turf-walls where the ferns grew thick, by bits of wild upland covered with gorse and rusty bracken, and down at last to the tiny hamlet—­four or five low white houses, in little gardens where the escallonia grew thick and glossy, the purple veronica bloomed richly, and the green fleshy mesembryanthemum tumbled and dripped over the fences.  The tower itself rose straight out of a farmyard, where calves stared through the gate, pigs and hens routed and picked in the mire.  I have seldom seen so beautiful a bit of building:  it was a great square battlemented tower, with a turret, the mullioned windows stopped up with sea-worn boulders.  The whole built of very peculiar stone, of a dark grey tinge, weathered on the seaward side to a most delicate silvery grey, with ivy sprawling over it in places, like water shot out from a pail over a stone floor.  There were just a few traces of other buildings in the sheds and walls, and bits of carved stonework piled up in a rockery.  No doubt the little farm itself and the cottages were all built out of the ruins.

From the tower itself—­it has a few bare rooms filled with farm lumber—­one can see down the valley to the long grey line of the Prah sands, and the low dusky cliffs of Hove point, where the waves were breaking white.

I suppose it needed to be a strong place.  The Algiers and Sallee pirates used to make descents upon this coast till a comparatively recent date.  As late as 1636 they kidnapped seven boats and forty-two fishermen off the Manacles, none of whom were ever heard of again.  Eighty fishermen from Looe were captured in one day, and there is a complaint extant from the justices of Cornwall to the lord lieutenant that in one year Cornwall had lost above a thousand mariners thus!

But there was also another side to the picture; the natives all along this coast were dreadful wreckers and plunderers themselves, and made little account of burning a ship and knocking the survivors on the head.  The very parish, Germoe, in which Pengersick stands, had as bad a name as any in Cornwall: 

     God keep us from rocks and shelving sands,
     And save us from Breage and Germoe men’s hands,

runs the old rhyme.  And there is an evil old story of how a treasure ship, the St. Andrew of Portugal, went ashore at Gunwalloe in January 1526.  There were thousands of cakes of copper and silver on board, plate, pearls, jewels, chains, brooches, arras, satins, velvets, sets of armour for the King of Portugal, and a huge chest of coined gold.