becomes it best.  The fuchsias grow against our walls and tap at our window-panes in the morning as though they were roses; they even make their homes in the rocks, like the conies.  The island is a very garden of fuchsias, tall as trees; and there are no other trees.  The ‘Welcome’ itself is a sort of farmhouse without the farm; there is a goat or two and a donkey to be seen about it, which would account for the milk having an alien flavour, if it had one.  But the ‘Welcome’ has excellent milk, so that there must be some cows somewhere.  From the cliff-top you may see Alderney, for our inn is among the Channel Islands.  When a storm comes you must stop where you are; for until the last waves of it have ceased there is no approach to us from the world without.  To the stranger it seems probable at such seasons that the little place will burst up from below, for beneath it are caverns innumerable, filled with furious waves like sea monsters roaring for our lives.  The sea, in short, has honeycombed it, and renews her vows to be its ruin with every gale.  Yet the ‘Welcome’ lasts our time, and will last that of many generations, who will continue, however, doubtless to believe that the sublimities of Nature are unattainable short of Switzerland.

My memory now transports me to a mountain district in the north, but on this side of the border; and here, again, the inn is signless, and has no appearance of an inn at all.  It is situated on the last of a great chain of hills, with lakes among them.  It has lawns and shrubberies, but few flowers; Nature frowns on every hand, even in sunshine, when the waterfalls flow like silver, and the crags are decked with diamonds.  There are no ‘trencher-scraping, napkin-carrying,’ waiters in the house, but country damsels attend upon you, and a motherly dame, their mistress, expresses her hope every morning that you have slept well.  If you have not, it is the fault of your conscience:  you have had a poet’s recipe for it, for you have been ‘within the hearing of a hundred streams’ all night.  Will you go up the Fells, or will you row on the Lake?  These are your simple alternatives; there is no brass band, no promenade, no pier, no anything that the vulgar like.  Yet once a week at least a great spectacle can be promised you without crossing the inn threshold (indeed, when the promise is kept it is better to be on the right side of it)—­a thunder-storm among the hills.  The arrangements for lighting the place, of which you may have complained, not without reason, are then in perfection, and the silence is broken with a vengeance.  It is difficult to imagine the grandeurs of a sham-fight—­a battle without corpses—­but here you have them.  First the musketry, then the guns, with the explosion of the powder-magazine—­repeated about forty times by the mountain echoes—­at the end of it.  When all is over you sit down to such a supper as Lucullus would have given a year of life for, and which, in all probability—­for