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82 THE CORNWALL COAST when they pick and steal, as happened to one of the fair sex yesterday noon. She was per- tinacious in her behaviour, and damned the mayor." One might have expected that he would at least have had a word for the town's beauty of position and for its magnificent har- bour ; but such things were features that he usually ignored in his letters, and his avoidance of the poetical always amounted to an affectation. Defoe, who had been here about eighty years earlier, found something to say about the har- bour as being, " next to Milford Haven, the fairest and best road for shipping that is in the whole isle of Britain." Of Falmouth itself he says that "it is by much the richest and best trading town in this county, though not so ancient as its neighbour town of Truro." Truro might have the honour, but "Falmouth has gotten the trade." He says further that " Falmouth is well built, has abund- ance of shipping, is full of rich merchants, and has a flourishing and increasing trade. I say ' increasing,' because by the late setting up the English packets between this port and Lisbon, there is a new commerce between Portugal and this town carried on to a very great value." The origin of this trading, he suggests, was very much assisted by a species of export-smuggling, whereby British manufactures were carried from England to Portugal without paying custom at either end. But the custom-house soon put an end to this, or at least greatly modified it. Among other notable visitors it is interesting to remember that Disraeli was here in his younger days, in 1830, detained before starting on his own somewhat Byronic voyage to the Mediterranean ; he found the town " one of the most charming places I ever