Devonshire, and never appeared again in these parts.” Would that he had taken a longer leap, out of England altogether! As we came near Bodmin the country became much prettier, the whole length of the valley is richly wooded. We entered the town by the Asylum. Bodmin seems now a place of some importance, in days of yore it was the largest town in Cornwall. At the Royal Hotel we were transferred to a smart new omnibus, which took us to Bodmin Road Station. It was a glorious evening, and we can hardly say too much for the beauty of the estuary of the Tamar, the setting sun throwing a rich glow over the woods and water. We reached Exeter late at night, and took up our quarters at the nearest hotel. The morning was spent in seeing over the cathedral and city, ending with a look at the fine statue of Sir Thomas Dyke Acland. We returned as we went, by the South Western express, and reached London well satisfied with our journey, and all the brighter and better, we hope, for its many enjoyments.
THE SKIPPER’S WIFE.
(FOUNDED ON FACT.)
Elruin is much like other fishing villages on the Suffolk coast, nothing particularly striking in scenery; some say the lights on the water are more varied than in many places, and when the sun sets in the sultry summer evenings, there certainly is a particularly bright line of dancing light from the horizon, ending where the waves ripple in at the base of the cliff.
I say cliff, for there is only one at Elruin, jutting out some forty yards farther than the rest of the mainland, which forms almost a straight line from the harbour, a mile to the east of the village, to the remains of the old castle, a hundred yards to the west of the cliff.
The Shark’s-tooth Cliff, as it is called, rises about 60 feet above the sea; it used to be much higher once, but every year, as the tides run high, a portion gives way.
One of the fishermen has often told me that he could remember well, as a child, its being a perfect hill, and that he and the other lads used to amuse themselves by sliding down the slippery turf facing the sea, and gathering the mushrooms for which the hill used to be so celebrated.
The sea encroaches very fast, though not so rapidly as it did before they put up the breakwater.
At certain times, when the tides are very low, you can see a rock covered with long matted sea-weeds: this the fishermen call the Belfry Rock, and it is where the old parish church used to stand.
Three years ago, when the tides were very low, I hired a boat, and was rowed out to the Belfry. The waters were as still and clear as crystal, and, gazing over the sides of the crab-boat, I could distinctly make out in places where the foundations must have stood. I had been reading the account of the old church in the county history, and it seemed to me so strange to be floating over the foundations of those Norman arches that had once been so much admired.
As I gazed down I saw the red lines of seaweed lazily moving at the bottom, where the shrimps were darting about, and the little eels showing their pointed heads from the crevices of what might have been old building stones.
It was an important village once, Elruin, and the church (so said my county history) was the pride of the neighbourhood.
The noble family of Blais for many a hundred years owned the entire parish, and, among other strange things, I read how, up to 1600, they used to enforce a toll on every boat in the village, as it returned from the herring or mackarel harvest; and how no boats were permitted to put out on the day that a body was borne from the castle to the family vaults, long since filled with sand and sea-water.
The fishermen’s wives, even to the present day, frighten their noisy children into silence, by threatening to hand them over to the Black Earl.
Who this Black Earl was, I could never quite satisfactorily discover; but tradition said that an owner of the place, some hundreds of years ago, had finished a life of unexampled wickedness by springing off the cliff into the sea; and this I know, that even to this time, before a storm the fishermen will tell you that the form of the Black Earl is to be seen hovering over where the chancel of the church stood, and where his body, if it could have been found, would have been buried.
“Can’t see much of the ruin, young gentleman,” said the old fisherman who had rowed me out, and who had been watching with evident satisfaction the interest I took in surveying the site of the church, which he, in common with the other villagers, took great delight in pointing out.
“Very little,” I said, waking from my reverie about the old Norman church, St. Matthias’, its vaults filled with sand and seaweed, and all those bodies resting round it, where the once grassy churchyard stretched, waiting till the sea shall give up its dead.
I had been thinking and dreaming, till I could almost fancy that the low rolling of the sea was the sound of the organ, and that once more Elruin Church stood before me, with its