Page:The Cornwall coast.djvu/76

70 THE CORNWALL COAST fishing-ports on the Cornish coast, and though it has not quite maintained its relative position, it is not done with yet. The town can also boast some fame as the Aberalva of Kingsley's Tioo Tears Ago, a book once far more popular than it is to-day. The same claim has been made for Clovelly ; but though some features in the novelist's description may be applied equally to both, there are other points that can only be attributed to Mevagissey. Kingsley, who wrote the book fifty years since, says : " Between two ridges of high pebble bank some twenty yards apart, comes Alva River rushing to the sea. On the opposite ridge, a low white house, with three or four white canvas-covered boats and a flagstaff with sloping crossyard, betokens the coastguard station. Be- yond it rise black jagged cliffs ; mile after mile of iron-bound wall : and here and there, at the glens' mouths, great banks and denes of shifting sand. . . . Above, a green down stretches up to bright yellow furze-crofts far aloft. Behind, a reedy marsh, covered with red cattle, paves the valley till it closes in ; the steep sides of the hill are clothed in oak and ash covert. . . . Pleasant little glimpses there are, too, of gray stone farm- houses, nestling among sycamore and beech ; bright green meadows, alder-fringed ; squares of rich fallow-field, parted by lines of golden furze ; all cut out with a peculiar blackness and clearness, soft and tender withal, which betokens a climate surcharged with rain. Only, in the very bosom of the valley, a soft mist hangs, increasing the sense of distance, and softening back one hill and wood behind another, till the great brown moor which backs it all seems to rise out of the empty air. For a thousand feet it ranges up, in huge sheets