The wretched crew got most of the treasure to land and stacked it on the cliffs, when John Milliton of Pengersick, with a St. Aubyn and a Godolphin, came down with sixty armed men, and took all the treasure away.  Complaints were made, and the three gentlemen protested that they had but ridden down to save the crew, had found them destitute, and had even given them money.  But I daresay the big guest-chamber of Pengersick was hung with Portuguese arras for many a long year afterwards.

The Millitons died out, and their land passed by purchase or marriage to the descendants of another of the three pious squires, Godolphin of Godolphin—­and belongs to-day to his descendant, the Duke of Leeds.

One would have thought that men could not have borne to live so, in such deadly insecurity.  But probably they troubled their heads little about the pirates, kept the women and children at home, and set a retainer on the cliff in open weather, to scan the offing for the light-rigged barques, while poorer folk took their chance.  We live among a different set of risks now, and think little of them, as the days pass.

The life of the tower was simple and hardy enough—­some fishing and hunting, some setting of springes on the moor for woodcock and rabbits, much farmwork, solid eating and drinking, and an occasional carouse—­a rude, plentiful, healthy life, perhaps not as far removed from our own as we like to believe.

But the old tower spoke to me to-day of different things, of the buried life of the past, of the strange drift of human souls through the world for their little span of life, love, and sorrow, and all so pathetically ignorant of what goes before and follows after, why it so comes about, and what is the final aim of the will we blindly serve.  Here was a house of men, I said to myself, with the same hopes and fears and fancies as myself, and yet none of them, could I recall them, could give me any reason for the life we thus hurriedly live, so much of it entirely joyful and delightful, so much of it distasteful and afflicting.  On a sunny day of summer, with the sea a sapphire blue, set with great purple patches, the scent of the gorse in the air, the sound of the clear stream in one’s ears, what could be sweeter than to live? and even on dark days, when the wind volleys up from the sea, and the rain dashes on the windows, and the gulls veer and sail overhead, the great guest-room with its fire of wreckage, the women working, the children playing about, must have been a pleasant place enough.  But even to the strongest and boldest of the old squires the end came, as the waggon with the coffin jolted along the stony lane, and the bell of Germoe came faintly over the hill.