it of his love for the wife who was dead—­dead, but a rival still.  My father lived in mortal fear of this jealousy.  Yet my mother was a devoted and a fond wife.  I remember in especial the flash that would come from her eyes, the fiery flush that would overspread her face, whenever she saw my father open certain antique silver casket which he kept in his escritoire when at home, and carried about with him when travelling.  The casket (I soon learned) contained momentos of his first wife, between whom and himself there seems to have been a deep natural sympathy such did not exist between my mother and him.  This first wife he had lost under peculiarly painful circum-stances, which it is necessary that I should briefly narrate.  She had been drowned before his very eyes that cove beneath the church which I have already described.

This semicircular indentation at the end of the peninsula or headland on which the church stood was specially dangerous in two ways.  It was a fatal spot where sea and land were equally treacherous.  On the sands the tide, and on the cliffs the landslip, imperilled the lives of the unwary.  Half, at least, of the churchyard had been condemned as ‘dangerous,’ and this very same spot was the only one on the coast where the pedestrian along the sands ran any serious risk of being entrapped by the tide; for the peninsula on which the church stood jutted out for a considerable distance into the sea, and then was scooped out in the form of a boot-jack, and so caught the full force of the waves.  One corner, as already mentioned, was called Flinty Point, the other Needle Point, and between these two points there was no gangway within the semicircle up the wall of cliff.  Indeed, within the cove the cliff was perpendicular, or rather overhanging, as far as such crumbling earth would admit of its overhanging.  To reach a gangway, a person inside the cove would have to leave the cliff wall for the open sands, and pass round either Needle Point or Flinty Point.  Hence the cove was sometimes called Mousetrap Cove, because when the tide reached so high as to touch these two points, a person on the sands within the cove was caught as in a mousetrap, and the only means of extrication was by boat from the sea.  It was the irresistible action of the sea upon the peninsula (called Church Headland) that had doomed church and churchyard to certain destruction.

Dangerous as was this cove, there was something peculiarly fascinating about it.  The black, smooth, undulating boulders that dotted the sand here and there formed the most delightful seats upon which to meditate or read.  It was a favourite spot with my father’s first wife, who had been a Swiss governess.  She was a great reader and student, but it was not till after her death that my father became one.  The poor lady was fond of bringing her books to the cove, and pursuing her studies or meditations with the sound of the sea’s chime in her ears.  My father, at that time I believe a simple, happy country squire, but showing strong signs of his Romany ancestry, had often warned her of the risk she ran, and one day he had the agony of seeing her from the cliff locked in the cove, and drowning before his eyes ere a boat could be got, while he and the coastguard stood powerless to reach her.