fluttered from woodland down to garden, and from garden up to
woodland, and seemed to form the connecting link between that
swarming hive of human industry and the deep wild woods in which it
was embosomed. So up I was crawling, to dine off gurnards of my own
catching,--excellent fish, despised by deluded Cockneys, who fancy
that because its head is large and prickly, therefore its flesh is
not as firm, and sweet, and white, as that of any cod who ever
gobbled shell-fish,--when down the stair front of me, greasy as ice
from the daily shower, came slipping and staggering, my friend
Claude, armed with camp-stool and portfolio.

'Where have you been wandering to-day?' I asked. 'Have you yet been
as far as the park, which, as I told you, would supply such endless
subjects for your pencil?'

'Not I. I have been roaming up and down this same "New Road" above
us; and find there materials for a good week's more work, if I could
afford it. Indeed, it was only to-day, for the first time, that I
got as far as the lodge at the end of it, and then was glad enough to
turn back shuddering at the first glimpse of the flat, dreary
moorland beyond,--as Adam may have turned back into Eden after a peep
out of the gates of Paradise.'

He should have taken courage and gone a half-mile further,--to the
furze-grown ruins of a great Roman camp, which gives its name to the
place, 'Clovelly,'--Vallum Clausum, or Vallis Clausa, as antiquarians
derive it; perhaps, 'the hidden camp,' or glen,--perhaps something
else. Who cares? The old Romans were there, at least 10,000 strong:
and some sentimental tribune or other of them had taste enough to
perch his summer-house out on a conical point of the Hartland Cliffs,