measuring nine by five and a half inches. Copies are rare, but may
yet be picked up on secondhand bookstalls for six or seven shillings.

From this 'History of Polpier' I must quote--being unable to better
it--his description of the little town. (He ever insisted in calling
it a town, not a village, although it contained less than fourteen
hundred inhabitants.)

"If the map of the coast of Cornwall be examined, on the
south-east, between the estuaries of the two rivers that divide
the Hundred of West from the Hundred of East and the Hundred of
Powder, will be noticed an indentation of the littoral line, in
which cleft lies the little town of Polpier. Tall hills,
abrupt and rugged, shut in a deep and tortuous valley, formed
by the meeting of smaller coombs; houses, which seem dropped
rather than built, crowd the valley and its rocky ledges; a
rapid rivulet dances in and out among the dwellings, till its
voice is lost in the waters of a tidal haven, thronged with
fishing boats and guarded by its Peak of serried rock."

The Doctor after this first modest mention of "a rivulet" invariably
writes of it as "the River," and by no other name does Polpier speak
of it to this day. On the lower or seaward side of the bridge-end,
where the channel measures some three yards across, the flank of his
house leaned over the rushing water, to the sound of which he slept
at night. Across the stream the house of Mr Barrabell, clerk, leaned
forward at a more pronounced angle, so that the two neighbours, had
they been so minded, might have shaken hands between their bedroom
windows before retiring to rest. Tradition reports this Mr Barrabell
(though an accountant for most of the privateering companies in