another train for Troy. This brought half his holiday to a close: the
remaining half he meant to devote to the Mining District, St. Ives,
the Land's End, St. Michael's Mount, the Lizard, and perhaps the
Scilly Isles.

Then I began to feel that I lived in a nook, and to wonder how I could
spin out its attractions to cover a whole day: for I could not hear to
think of his departing with secret regret for his lavished time. In
a flash I saw the truth; that my love for this spot is built up of
numberless trivialities, of small memories all incommunicable, or
ridiculous when communicated; a scrap of local speech heard at this
corner, a pleasant native face remembered in that doorway, a battered
vessel dropping anchor--she went out in the spring with her crew
singing dolefully; and the grey-bearded man waiting in his boat
beneath her counter till the custom-house officers have made their
survey is the father of one among the crew, and is waiting to take
his son's hand again, after months of absence. Would this interest my
friend, if I pointed it out to him? Or, if I walk with him by the path
above the creek, what will he care to know that on this particular
bank the violets always bloom earliest--that one of a line of
yews that top the churchyard wall is remarkable because a pair of
missel-thrushes have chosen it to build in for three successive years?
The violets are gone. The empty nest has almost dissolved under the
late heavy rains, and the yew is so like its fellows that I myself
have no idea why the birds chose it. The longer I reflected the
more certain I felt that my friend could find all he wanted in the
guide-books.

None the less, I did my best: rowed him for a mile or two up the
river; took him out to sea, and along the coast for half a dozen