CORNWALL

"Here lies I at the church door.Here lies I because I's poor.The farther in, the more to pay;But here lies I as well as they."

Our homeward walk, by a different road, gave us a clearer impression of the ranges of naked hilltops which make up the Hartland parish. Upon those rounded summits rested a mellow western light which had dimmed into dusk when we finally risked our weary bones on the slippery "back staircase" of Clovelly.

We journeyed from Clovelly to Bideford by carrier's cart, sitting up with what dignity we could amidst a remarkable miscellanyof packages. Once arrived at Kingsley's hero-town, we read, as in honour bound, the opening chapter of "Westward Ho!" crossed the historic bridge and sought out in the church the brass erected to the noble memory of Sir Richard Grenville, who drove the littleRevengewith such a gallant recklessness into the thick of the Spanish fleet, fought his immortal fight, and died of his wounds "with a joyful and quiet mind." The exceeding charm of this Bristol Channel coast made us intolerant of trains and even of coaches, so that at lovely, idle Ilfracombe we took to our feet again and walked on by a cliff path to Combe Martin. Here we were startled, on going to bed, to find packed away between the thin mattresses a hoard of green pears, hard as marbles, and not much bigger, which the small boy of the inn, apparently intent on suicide, had secreted. The towered church, some eight or nine centuries old, was shown to us by a sexton who claimed that the office had descended in his family from father to son for the past three hundred years. However that may be, he was an entertaining guide, reading off his favourite "posy-stones" with a relish, and interpreting thecarvings of the curious old rood-screen according to a version of Scripture unlike any that we had known before. Thence our way climbed up for two toilsome miles through a muddy sunken lane, in whose rock walls was a growth of dainty fern. It was good to come out in view of the rival purples of sunny sea and heathery hills, good to be regaled on "cold shoulder" and Devonshire junket in a stone-floored kitchen with vast fireplace and ponderous oaken settles, good to start off again across Trentishoe Common, glorious with gorse, and down the richly wooded combe, past a farmyard whose great black pig grunted at us fearsomely, and still down and down, through the fragrance of the pines. We turned off our track to follow the eddying Heddon to the sea, and had, in consequence, a stiff scramble to gain our proper path cut high in the Channel side of the cliff. We walked along that narrow way in a beauty almost too great to bear, but the stress of emotion found some relief in the attention we had to give to our footing, for the cliff fell sheer to the sunset-coloured waters. We spent the night at Wooda Bay, walking on in the morning for a jocund mile or two throughfresh-scented larchwoods, then across Lee Abbey Park and through the fantastic Valley of Rocks, along another cliff-walk and down a steep descent to Lynmouth, where Shelley's "myrtle-twined cottage" stands upon the beach. Lynmouth, where the songs of sea and river blend, was more to our taste in its picturesque mingling of the old and the new, of herring-village and watering-place, than its airy twin, Linton, perched on the cliff-top four hundred feet above, but both are little paradises and, having located ourselves in one, the first thing we did was to leave it and visit the other. We lingered for a little in this exquisite corner of creation, till one blithe morning we could put up no longer with the saucy challenge of the Lyn and chased that somersaulting sprite, that perpetual waterfall, five miles inland, so coming out on the heathery waste of Exmoor.

We would gladly have turned gipsies then and there, if so we might have wandered all over and over that beautiful wild upland, and down through the undulating plain of mid-Devon, with its well-watered pastures and rich dairy-farms for whose butter and cheese the Devonshire sailors, as Hakluyt'snarratives tell, used to long sorely on their far voyages. But the genuine garden of Devon is South Hams, below Dartmoor and between the Teign and the Tamar. This is the apple-country of which the poet sings:

"For me there's nought I would not giveFor the good Devon land,Whose orchards down the echoing cleeveBedewed with spray-drift stand,And hardly bear the red fruit upThat shall be next year's cider-cup."

Little as Parson Herrick, the indignant incumbent of Dean Prior, enjoyed his Devonshire charge, the cider industry of the region must have appealed to him.

But this broad county, outranked in size only by York and Lincolnshire, has in its south, as in its north, a desolate tableland. Dartmoor has been described as a "monstrous lump of granite, covered with a peaty soil." The rocks are rich in lead and iron, tin and copper, but the soil is too poor even for furze to flourish in it. Heather, reeds, moss and whortleberries make shift to grow, and afford a rough pasturage to the scampering wild ponies, the moor-sheep and red cattle. It is a silent land of rugged tors andblack morasses, of sudden mists and glooms, of prehistoric huts, abandoned mines, and, above all, for "Superstition clings to the granite," of dark stories, weird spells, and strange enchantments. Indeed, it folds a horror in its heart,—Dartmoor Prison, where our American sailors suffered a century ago, and where English convicts are now ringed in by grim walls and armed sentries. It is said that even to-day, when a Dartmoor child gets a burn, the mother's first remedy is to lay her thumb upon the smarting spot and repeat:

"There came two angels out of the west,One brought fire, the other brought frost.Out, fire! In, frost!By the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost!Amen, amen, amen."

Among the mysterious groups of so-called Druid stones is a circle known as the Nine Maidens, for these uncouth grey shapes were once slender girls so fond of dancing that they would not cease on Sunday, and for that sin were petrified. And still every Sabbath noon these impenitent stones come to life and dance thrice around in a circle.

But the veritable Pixydom lies south of the Tamar. In Cornwall, that stretch of deserted moors furrowed on either side by little river-valleys, that rocky promontory which seems to belong more to the kingdom of the sea than to England, the Celtic imagination has rioted at will. There were giants in the land in bygone days, for the wanderer among those strangely sculptured crags of granite, slate, and serpentine chances at every turn on a Giant's Cradle or a Giant's Chair, Giant's Spoon, Giant's Bowl, Giant's Key, Giant's Hat, Giant's Table, Giant's Well, Giant's Pulpit, Giant's Grave. Cornishmen have heard the music and seen the fairy dances, spied on fairy banquets, and peeped in on fairy funerals. The Small People have been gay and kindly neighbours, sometimes whisking away a neglected baby and returning the little mortal all pink and clean, wrapped inleaves and blossoms, "as sweet as a nut." These are the spirits of Druids, or of other early Cornwall folk, who, as heathen, may not go to heaven, but are too innocent for hell. So they are suffered to live on in their old happy haunts, but ever dwindling and dwindling, till it is to be feared that bye and bye, what with all the children growing stupid over schoolbooks, and all the poets writing realistic novels, the Small People will twinkle out of sight. The Spriggans, lurking about the cairns and cromlechs, where they keep guard over buried treasures, could better be spared. They are such thievish and mischievous trolls, with such extraordinary strength in their ugly bits of bodies, it is more likely they are the diminished ghosts of the old giants. The Piskies are nearly as bad, as any bewildered traveller who has been Pisky-led into a bog would testify. The only sure protection against their tricks is to wear your garments inside out. Many a Cornish farmer has found a fine young horse all sweated and spent in the morning, his mane knotted into fairy stirrups showing plainly how some score of the Piskies had been riding him over night. And many a Cornish miner, deep down in theearth, has felt his hair rise on his head as he heard thetap,tap,tapof the Knockers, souls of long-imprisoned Jews sent here by Roman emperors to work the tin-mines of Cornwall. The Brownies, who used to be so helpful about the house, have grown shy of late and can be depended on for assistance only when the bees are swarming. Then the housewife beats on a tin pan, calling at the top of her voice: "Brownie! Brownie!" till she sees that he has heard her and is persuading the bees to settle. Offended mermaids have choked up Cornish harbours and buried sea-coast villages under sand. If you doubt it, go and look at the little church of St. Piran—the miners' saint, who came sailing from Ireland on a millstone and discovered the Cornish tin—the church that for seven centuries was hidden under the sands and then, as the restless winds sifted and searched them, rose again to human sight. Spectral hounds bay across the moors, and a phantom coach is sometimes heard rolling with a hollow rumble along the deep-hedged roads. Ghost ships with all sail set drive by the shores on gusty nights, and the Death Ship, tall, dark, square-rigged, with black sails and a demon crew, hasbeen known to come, in crashes of thunder and flare of lightning, for the soul of a notorious wrecker. Drowned sailors call from under the tide or speed along the strand with dripping clothes and hair. Witches, sorcerers, fortune-tellers, charmers and "cunning men" are among the historic characters of Cornwall. In fact, the Witch of Freddam still rides the seas in her coffin, stirring up storms with her ladle and broom. The luckless sailor who has set eyes on her will not see his home again. Miners, too, have their special dangers. The goblins that they sometimes chance on underground, hunched up into uncouth shapes or tumbling heels over head, are not ill-met, as their presence indicates rich lodes, but it would never do to mark a cross on the wall of a mine gallery, or to pass a snail on your way to the shaft without dropping for it a morsel of tallow from your candle. The newly dead notify their friends of the event in many a curious fashion, even by shaking the milk in the pans and spoiling the clotted cream. A woman shamed to suicide haunts her betrayer in the form of a white hare. Cornishmen cannot die easy on a feather-bed, nor in a housewhere any key is turned or bolt is shot, nor would they be carried to the grave by a new road, nor buried on the north side of the church. If rain fall—as in Cornwall it often does—on a bier, it is a sign that the soul has "arrived safe."

Amid all these supernatural influences, it is reassuring to know that the Devil never enters this county, having a wholesome fear of being made into a pie. His cloven hoofs once ventured across the Tamar, but he was dismayed to find that the Cornish women put everything, fish, flesh, fowl, vegetables, whatnot, into pie. By the time poor Beelzebub had partaken of fishy pie, stargazy pie—made of pilchards,—conger pie—made of eels,—lamy pie—made of kid,—herby pie, parsley pie, and piggy pie, his nerves gave way, and he bolted out of the shire so precipitately that he strewed the hills and the coast with his travelling equipment of Devil's Bellows, Devil's Ovens, and Devil's Frying-pans.

It is mainly in West Cornwall that such fantastic figurings in the rocks are referred to the Devil or the giants. On the eastern moors they are more commonly attributed toKing Arthur, whose Beds and Chairs and Cups and Saucers and the Footprints of whose horse are numerous enough to put the skeptic out of countenance. But not only our first encounter, as we entered Cornwall by the east, was with King Arthur, but almost our last, as we left the Duchy by the west,—for this shire is proud to be known as the Royal Duchy, claiming that the eldest son of the Crown is born Duke of Cornwall and only subsequently created Prince of Wales. Within what seemed but a short time after crossing the broad boundary stream, dotted with sleepy craft, we found ourselves at Liskeard, a sleepy old market-town blest with a noble church on whose outer wall is a sundial with the grave motto: "So soon passeth it away." It was already late in the afternoon, but a dark, thin, bright-eyed Cornishwoman in the railway carriage had given us most cheering information. Could we drive to Dozmare Pool before sunset? Easily; it was only a round of three or four miles and would take us by the Devil's Cheesewring and The Hurlers and St. Keyne's Well. The waters of this well, she went on to tell us, have the magic property of giving the upper handto that one of a wedded pair first drinking of them after the ceremony; and she recited with charming vivacity snatches of Southey's ballad, while a burly, red-faced, blue-eyed, beaming tourist from over the Tamar, the only man in the compartment, blurted out a gallantry to the effect that ladies ought to have their way anyhow, wells or no wells, and his silent little wife smiled a knowing little smile.

The people at the inn exchanged glances when we announced our route and although, setting out at five, we confidently ordered dinner at seven, the landlady slipped a packet of sandwiches and two bottles of ginger ale into the carriage. The coachman, thin and dark and vivid of countenance, like all the rest of this new Cornish world about us, kindly but firmly refused to include in the drive St. Keyne's Well, the Cheesewring, a curious pile of granite blocks some thirty feet high, whose topmost stone is so sensitive that it whirls about three times wheneverit hearsa cock crow, and The Hurlers, three prehistoric stone circles reported by legend, in its later Puritan garb, to be groups of young Cornishmen thus enchanted for indulgingon a Sunday in the traditional Cornish sport of "hurling." Dozmare Pool was all that our determined Jehu would undertake, although he graciously allowed us, in passing, a glimpse of St. Cleer's Well. This is not as famous as the well of St. Neot the Pigmy, who endowed the sacred waters with miraculous virtue by standing in them, day after day, immersed to his neck, while he repeated the entire book of Psalms, or of various others, but it is a spring of old renown, covered over by a steep-pitched roof supported on time-worn pillars and arches. The niches of this little open-air baptistry are now empty and its pinnacles are broken, but beside it still stands an ancient cross. The lofty-towered church of St. Cleer was close by, and we entered to bow our heads for a moment under its vaulted and timbered roof.

Our coachman would allow no further pause. The sunset was already casting a crimson light over the wastes of fern and bracken and the earthscars of abandoned mines, for the hills all about contain tin and copper, which it does not pay to work. Our old white nag—I hope his name was Merlin—seemed incapable of fatigue. I half suspecthe was a sorcery steed of metal. Up and down the hills he scrambled with unquenchable enthusiasm. As the sun sank into a bed of bracken, we marvelled that the driver could be sure of his way across those dim and featureless moors, but he turned unerringly from one deep lane into another. As we drew nearer the Pool, that "middle mere" into which Sir Bedivere flung the jewel-hilted Excalibur, the evil powers began to array themselves against us. For the wild spirit Tregeagle, whose howling as he is chased by demon dogs has been heard all over Cornwall, is doomed for his sins in this mortal life to labour endlessly at the hopeless task of emptying Dozmare Pool. It is so deep—notwithstanding the awkward fact of its going dry in rainless summers—that not all the bell-ropes in Cornwall can reach to its bottom, and a thorn-bush, once flung into it, floated out into Falmouth harbour. The bailing must be done by a limpetshell with a hole in it and, altogether, it is no wonder that Tregeagle's temper has grown exceedingly morose. For change of occupation, he is sometimes taken to the north coast and set to spinning ropes of sand, or is given achoked-up harbour to sweep out, but these tasks please him no better, and the shrieks of his torment are borne on every storm.

As we drove on, a light mist crept over the meadows and defined the course of an attendant stream. Clouds and trees took on weird aspects. There were Druid robes floating across the sky, misshapen figures crouching under the hedges, menacing arms shaken from the trees, and one wizard branch shot out and splashed our faces with unholy dew. The mist thickened and rose. The carriage left the road and bumped uncertainly along till it came to a stop at what we vaguely made out to be the foot of a hill. For by this time the clinging vapours had driven us into our waterproofs and so blurred all vision that the driver, who could not leave his fiery veteran of a horse, would not let us attempt the half-mile climb alone, but sent a shout plunging through that wet, white air and brought out some bogie of the moor embodied as a gaunt old Cornish dame to be our guide. Feeling her way with a stout stick, she led us up the hill and along a stony track where we could not see our steps nor one another's faces. When she stayed uswith her staff and said we had reached the pool, we could discern nothing of the sort, but reckless of life and limb we followed her down an abrupt bank and over a hummocky bit of ground to the very brink, as she assured us, of the bottomless tarn. We tried to think we saw a glimmer, although we heard not even

"the ripple washing in the reeds,And the wild water lapping on the crag."

Lacking an Excalibur, I cast a stone into the invisible, hoping I might hit Tregeagle, but the hollow splash that came back aroused such uncanny echoes we all three with one accord skurried away and scrabbled back down sandy ruts to the haven of the carriage. As we gratefully munched our sandwiches, we reflected that perhaps the mystical mere was more impressive so than if we had actually beheld that little fresh-water pond, about a mile in circumference and some eight or ten feet deep, lying on its mid-Cornwall tableland with the crest of Brown Gilly rising up behind. Our eyes had told us nothing that we could urge against Malory's geography, with its sea-route from Dozmare to Glastonbury.

CHURCH OF ST. COLUMB MINORCHURCH OF ST. COLUMB MINOR

"Then Sir Bedivere took the King upon his back, and so went with him to that water side, and when they were at the water side, even fast by the bank hoved a little barge with many fair ladies in it, and among them all was a queen, and all they had black hoods, and all they wept and shrieked when they saw King Arthur. 'Now put me into the barge,' said the King; and so he did softly. And there received him three queens with great mourning, and so they sat them down, and in one of their laps King Arthur laid his head, and then that queen said, 'Ah, dear brother, why have ye tarried so long from me? Alas; this wound on your head hath caught overmuch cold.' And so then they rowed from the land, and Sir Bedivere cried, 'Ah, my lord Arthur, what shall become of me, now ye go from me and leave me here alone among mine enemies?' 'Comfort thyself,' said the King, 'and do as well as thou mayst, for in me is no trust for to trust in. For I will into the vale of Avalon to heal me of my grievous wound.'"

But the Cornish mist in which Arthur fought his last "dim, weird battle of the west" was to us no longer a fable.

"A death-white mist slept over sand and sea;Whereof the chill, to him who breathed it, drewDown with his blood, till all his heart was coldWith formless fear; and ev'n on Arthur fellConfusion, since he saw not whom he fought.For friend and foe were shadows in the mist,And friend slew friend not knowing whom he slew;And some had visions out of golden youth,And some beheld the faces of old ghostsLook in upon the battle."

Now that we had braved Tregeagle and done the deed, that heavy mist thinned away as suddenly as it had gathered, and when, at ten o'clock, we reached our inn, the sky was bright with stars, and a great moon was slowly drifting up from the horizon.

But the paramount Table Round locality in Cornwall is Tintagel on the western coast where Arthur's Castle stands and where, moreover, the hushed tide brought him first from the mystery of "the great deep."

"For there was no man knew from whence he came;But after tempest, when the long wave brokeAll down the thundering shores of Bude and Boss,There came a day as still as heaven, and thenThey found a naked child upon the sandsOf wild Dundagil by the Cornish sea;And that was Arthur."

The high, bleak, rugged and desolate tract of Bodwin Moor, at whose heart is Dozmare Pool, lies between the four towns of Liskeard, Bodwin, Launceston and Camelford. This last was our starting-point for Tintagel. We had reached Camelford by a day's journeyfrom Penzance, setting out by train through a country seamed all over with abandoned surface diggings of the tin mines, pierced by shafts and defaced by heaps of mineral refuse to which heather was already bringing the first healing of nature. We had our nooning at Newquay and would have been glad to linger on its broad beach, looking up at the twin barrows where sleep, according to tradition, two kings of long ago,—kings who fought on that open headland a whole day through and fell together at sunset, each slain by the last thrust of the other. But we pressed on by carriage, hardly glancing at the long, low, stately towered church of St. Columb Minor, and cutting short our survey of the curious old panels, so richly carved with sacred emblems—pelicans, crosses, the instruments of the Passion, the pierced hand, a heart within a crown of thorns, the lamb, the wafer and the cup—in the brother church of St. Columb Major. From the depths of our Cornish road shut in by banks and hedges some ten or twelve feet high, we eyed the ripe blackberries hanging well above our reach; we saw a blazing rick on one side and, on the other, a maze of whitebutterflies circling among the fuchsia trees; we met a group of rustic mourners pushing a bier set on wheels; and just as the hedges began to open here and there, giving us vistas of wheatfield, moor, and sea, we found ourselves at Wadebridge, a little town with a street of ivy-greened houses dignified by a grey church-tower. We crossed a stone bridge of many arches that seemed too big for its river, and took train for Camelford. On our right we had the granite masses of Brown Willy and Rough Tor and presently, on our left, the great gashes of the Delalobe slate quarries.

ARTHUR'S CASTLE, TINTAGELARTHUR'S CASTLE, TINTAGEL

These held the close attention of a Cornish miner who, after forty years of fortune-seeking in Australia, was coming home to Camelford for a visit. He drove up with us in the rattling wagonette, gazing on ragged hedge and prickly furze as a thirsty soul might gaze on Paradise. The fulness of his heart overflowed in little laughters, though the tears were glistening on his lashes, and in broken words of memory and joy. He kept pointing out to us, mere strangers that we were, not noting and not caring what we were, the stiles and streams and rocks associated withspecial events of his boyhood and youth. As we went clattering down into the little stone huddle of houses, we had to turn away from the rapture in his eyes. Brothers and sisters were waiting to greet him, with tall children of theirs that had been to him but names, yet the human welcome could hardly penetrate through his dream, through his ecstatic communion with the scene itself. As we were driving out of Camelford early the next morning, we caught sight of our grizzled Cornishman once again, standing in one of those humble doorways with the shining still upon his face.

A man like that would make anybody homesick and, to speak impartially, we thought that Camelford was far less worthy of such emotion than two villages we severally remembered over sea. We fell out of humour with the poor old town, would not hear of it as the Arthurian Camelot,

"a city of shadowy palacesAnd stately,"

and disdained the tradition that the blameless king fell at Slaughter Bridge. My athletic comrade, however, to the admiration ofa flock of little schoolgirls, swung herself down the riverbank to see his tombstone and reported it as reading:

Caten hic jacit filius Marconi.

The drive to Tintagel was through a world of slate,—slate everywhere. There were slate walls, slate houses, heaps of slate-refuse, banks of broken slate feathered with gorse and heather, yawning mouths of disused slate quarries. We passed through defiles where slate was piled cliff-high on either side. Slate steps led up to the footpaths that ran along the top of the hedge-banks. By way of this forsaken region we came to a sleeping town. Tintagel Church lay before us, hoary, silent. Not a soul was in the streets,—not the fierce ghosts of Gorlois and of Uther Pendragon, nor the sad ghost of Igraine, nor the loving ghosts of Tristram and Iseult. We left the carriage and climbed by slippery paths to Arthur's Castle, which is no castle, but a colossal confusion of tumbled rocks, some heaped and mortared once by human hands, some grouped in the fantastic architecture of nature. There we sat astonished and dismayed, for the placeis like a robber hold, a den of pirates fortified against the land, rather than a court of chivalry. But the scene was superbly beautiful. The ocean on which we looked was a dazzling blue, and far to north and south stood out the stern, dark outlines of the coast. The sunshine that filled the surf with shimmering tints gleamed on the white plumage of a gull enthroned on the summit rock of the castle,—most likely the spirit of Guinevere, for Arthur, when he revisits Tintagel, comes as the Cornish chough,

"Talons and beak all red with blood,"—

a bird which no true Cornishman will shoot.

The monstrous crags and huge fragments of old wall were cleft in a fashion strongly suggestive of

"casements opening on the foamOf perilous seas in fairylands forlorn,"

and we shuddered to imagine with what stupendous force the terrible tides of winter must beat against that naked coast.

We realised what the fury of the sea-winds here must be as we strolled through the churchyard, whose slate slabs are buttressedwith masonry and, even so, tip and lean over those graves too old for grief. All is ancient about Tintagel church, and most of all the Norman font whose sculptured faces are worn dim and sleepy with innumerable years, each year bringing its quota of babies for the blessing of the holy water.

BOSCASTLEBOSCASTLE

We had to leave it,—the mysterious Titanic ruin with its bracken blowing in the wind, the sheep, chained in couples, that prick their silly noses on nettles and furze, the old church, where bells tolled without ringers on the day that Arthur fell, the old wayside cross, the old stone dovecote in the vicarage garden, but not the cliffs and the sea. For we drove up the coast to Boscastle, pausing on the way—and that was our mistake—to see the little church of Forrabury. This is the church that longed for a peal of bells to rival those of Tintagel, but when the vessel that brought the bells was waiting for the tide to take her into the harbour, and the pilot was thanking God for a fair voyage, the captain laughed and swore that it was only their own good seamanship they had to praise, whereupon a mighty billow, far out at sea, swept down upon the ship and overwhelmed her,only the devout pilot escaping with his life. And ever since—so ballad and guide-book assured us—the tower of Forrabury church has stood voiceless, though a muffled knell, when a storm is coming up, is heard beneath the waves. What then was our righteous wrath on finding this venerable edifice all newly done up in pink frescoes,—yes, and with an ornate bell-rope of scarlet twist hanging beneath the tower!

The harbour of Boscastle is a rock-walled inlet somewhat resembling that of Pasajes in the north of Spain. Curving promontories shut in a tidal stream that runs green in the sun and purple in the shadow. Swift lines of creaming foam glint across where the river yields itself up to the strong currents of the sea,—a sea which, as we saw it that brilliant September afternoon, twinkled with myriad points of intolerable light.

How can the pen cease from writing about Cornwall? And yet it must. There is a devil—a printer's devil—that counts our idle words. I may not tell of wind-swept Morwenstow, where Tennyson and Hawker roamed the wave-fretted cliffs together and talked of the Table Round, nor of loftyLaunceston, with its ivied Norman keep and great granite church whose outer walls are covered with elaborate carving. The sculptured figure of Mary Magdalen at the east end, lying on her face in an attitude of extreme dejection, is regularly stoned by the boys for luck, and flints and shards were lodged, when we saw her, all over her poor back. I may not tell of Bodwin, either, with its memory of a mayor who took a prominent part in the West Country revolt against the reformed service. As a consequence, when the agitation was over he was called upon to entertain the royal commissioner, who hanged his host after dinner.

It is a pity not to have space to suggest the softer beauties of the south coast. From Truro, after a visit to its new cathedral with its holy memory of Henry Martyn, we drove by way of Sunny Cove to Malpas. The gulls were screaming as they sought their dinner on the flats, and a man, wading through the pools, was gathering up belated little fishes in his hands. We sailed between wooded banks down the Fal to Falmouth, which is watched over by the garrisoned castle looming on Pendennis Head. The old port lies in picturesquedisorder along the inlet, while the new town stands handsomely on the height above. Here we saw, in lawns and gardens, a semi-tropical vegetation, yuccas, acacias, bamboos, aloes, palms, and pampas grass. Would that there were time to tell the smuggling scandals of the Killigrews, that witty and graceless family who ought to have learned better from their Quaker neighbours, the Foxes! It was by a Killigrew that Falmouth was founded in the reign of the first Stuart, and Killigrews made merry in Arwenach House, and made free with the merchandise of foreign ships, for many a pleasant year. The time when piracy could be counted an aristocratic amusement has gone by in Falmouth, as well as the bustling days when this port was an important packet station whence coaches and postchaises went speeding up to London. It is now putting on the gentler graces and coming into repute as a winter resort, though it has not yet attained the popularity of Penzance.

On our way from the one to the other we passed through the mining town of Redruth, near which, in the hollow known as Gwennap Pit, Wesley addressed vast audiences. On oneoccasion the number was reckoned as thirty-two thousand. "I shall scarce see a larger congregation," he wrote, "till we meet in the air." The more mystical doctrines of Fox took little hold on the rough fishermen and miners of Cornwall, but Wesley practically converted the Duchy, turning it from the most lawless corner of England, a lair of smugglers and wreckers, into a sober, well-conducted community. As little flames are said to be seen playing about a converted Cornishman, Wesley's path across the county must have been a veritable Milky Way. In such natural amphitheatres as Gwennap Pit, it may be that the Cornish Miracle Plays, so far excelling the English in freedom of fancy and symbolic suggestion, were given. We looked wistfully from Hayle over to St. Ives, with its long line of fishing boats tied up like horses to a church fence, but since we could follow only one road at once, held on our way to Penzance.

THE LIZARD LIGHT, CORNWALLTHE LIZARD LIGHT, CORNWALL

Beautiful for situation, the "Holy Headland" looks out over waters exquisitely coloured toward

"the great Vision of the Guarded Mount,"

St. Michael's Mount, a solemn cone, fortress-crowned, above which a praying hermit, when the setting sun was flooding the skies with splendour, might easily have deemed he saw the guardian wings of the Archangel. As all Cornish children know, this mount was built by the giant Cormoran and rose, in those days when Mount's Bay was a fertile plain of several parishes, from the midst of a forest, "a hoare rock in a wood." It was the scene of the glorious exploit of Jack the Giant-Killer, who was afterwards appointed tutor to King Arthur's eldest son in that special branch of warfare. Cornwall is so fond of its old giants that it sometimes, so folklorists say, confuses their deeds with those of the saints. But it loves its saints, too, who are said to be more numerous than the saints in Paradise. Cornish churches stand open all day long, and old Cornwall's affectionate name for the Virgin was "Aunt Mary."

The view ranges on across Mount's Bay to The Lizard, that peninsula so beautiful with its serpentine cliffs and Cornish heath, the wildest and loneliest part of all wild and lonely Cornwall; but our route lay to its companion point on the southwest. Ourdriver literally knew every inch of the road and pointed out to us cross after cross, and cromlech after cromlech,—such vague old stones, worn featureless and almost formless, built into walls, half sunken under the turf, embedded in banks, peering at us from across a field, thrusting a grey visage through a hedge,—sometimes a mere time-eaten stump, sometimes a heathen monolith with the afterthought of a crucifix rudely graved upon it, sometimes a complete square cross. These last we often found in churchyards, set up on stone platforms approached by a flight of steps. Such was the one we noted in the churchyard of St. Buryan, another of those long, low, lofty-towered old churches characteristic of Cornwall.

As we neared Penberth Cove, the Atlantic opened out to view, its sparkling turquoise relieved by one white sail. It was in Penberth Cove that there once lived a bedridden old woman, a good old soul, about whose one-roomed cottage the Small People, to divert her, used to sport all day, catching her mice and riding them in and out of holes in the thatch, dancing the dust off the rafters and giving trapeze and tight-rope performanceson the cobwebs. The valley runs green to the sea and we left the carriage for a walk across the fields, a walk diversified by stiles of all known species, to Treryn Castle. This monstrous fastness of heaped rock and jagged crag was built by a giant who was such a clever necromancer that all he had to do was to sit in the Giant's Easy-chair, to whose discomfort we can testify, and will the castle to rise out of the sea. For latter-day necromancy, our guide pointed out Porthcurnow Beach, where, he said, six submarine cables land. He was a native of the coast, a fisherman, and gave us eyes to see the gulls rejoicing over their feast of pilchards, and ears to hear the whistle of a young otter. The Lion of Treryn is the Logan Rock, but we first encountered, in our scramble over the crags, Lady Logan, a stumpy personage whose hood and skirt, though recognisable, are of the Stone Age fashion. This granite beauty is so sensitive in her feelings that she trembles at a touch. As we climbed higher among the rocks, in the exhilarating air, we won views ever more wonderful of rolling green billows shattered into clouds of spray upon the shore. TheLogan itself is an enormous rocking-stone,—a boulder weighing some seventy tons delicately balanced on cubical masses of rock. It does not, like the rocking-stone in Burma on which a little pagoda has been built, oscillate in the wind, but swings at a sturdy push. It was formerly more easily swayed than now, for a mischievous young Goldsmith, nephew of the poet who was himself so prankishly inclined, undertook in 1824, when commanding a revenue cutter off this coast, to dispel the popular notion that no human force could dislodge Logan Rock. On the eighth of April, though the first would have been more appropriate, he landed with a crew of eight men, meaning to tip the stone over into the sea. But he only succeeded in moving it some four feet to the left and, even so, found his escapade an expensive one, for it cost ten thousand dollars to replace the ponderous mass—as the anger of the people compelled the Admiralty to order him to do—on its original pivot. With all his efforts, he could not hit the perfect poise, and whereas Logan Rock once had the power of healing sick children who were rocked upon it, that spell no longerworks. It was not the right hour for us to ascertain whether touching the stone thrice three times would still make a woman a witch. This test should be undertaken at midnight, when a battalion of sympathetic hags, mounted on stems of ragwort, would be hooting encouragement from their favourite rendezvous at the towering crag south of Logan Rock known as Castle Peak.

LAND'S ENDLAND'S END

We returned to our carriage and drove on. The fields of gorse and heather suddenly slipped over foaming reefs and we were at Land's End. Great waves were churning themselves white against the ledges. A few sails glinted on the horizon; a few gulls were perching on the rocks; but we were, at first, aware of nothing save the steep, broken wall of granite and the strange, compelling song of the Atlantic. By degrees we noted light-houses, bays, and a curious cavern, with such wave-eaten arches as we had seen at Biarritz, beneath our very feet. We walked along the edge of the cliffs, green with turf to the sheer plunge. At places, indeed, the heather runs down the rocks to meet the tide. We passed close by gulls that stood unstartled in this their own domain of crags and spray-dashedgorges, eyeing severely the approach of uninvited guests.

The sun was setting and we could distinguish the Scilly Isles like gold cloudlets resting on the sea. Between these islands and Land's End once bloomed the lost Arthurian realm of Lyonesse. But weary of the past and its dim fables, our hearts followed that rippling line of splendour further and further west, far out across the Atlantic to the land of hope and promise, the strong young land that fronts the future, vowed to the great adventure of human brotherhood.

The University Press, Cambridge, U. S. A.

FOOTNOTES:[1]Blaze.[2]Made.[3]Inquire.[4]Irons.[5]Mad.[6]From the account given by Sir William Dugdale, the celebrated antiquary, who was born at Shustoke, eight miles west of Nuneaton, in 1605, and educated at Coventry. "The Antiquities of Warwickshire" he published in 1656. He died in 1686, and his tomb, with his own inscription, may be seen in the chancel of Shustoke Church.[7]Leland.[8]"Gregory's Chronicle." In "Historical Collections of a Citizen of London in the Fifteenth Century." Camden Society: 1876.[9]Tennyson's "The Holy Grail," 36-64.

[1]Blaze.

[2]Made.

[3]Inquire.

[4]Irons.

[5]Mad.

[6]From the account given by Sir William Dugdale, the celebrated antiquary, who was born at Shustoke, eight miles west of Nuneaton, in 1605, and educated at Coventry. "The Antiquities of Warwickshire" he published in 1656. He died in 1686, and his tomb, with his own inscription, may be seen in the chancel of Shustoke Church.

[7]Leland.

[8]"Gregory's Chronicle." In "Historical Collections of a Citizen of London in the Fifteenth Century." Camden Society: 1876.

[9]Tennyson's "The Holy Grail," 36-64.

Transcriber's Notes:Obvious printer's errors repaired. Otherwise, unusual spellings and grammar--including hyphenation inconsistencies--were retained as in the original.P. 253, "Both fine and cleane..."; Although opening quotes usually indicate a new stanza, in this case there was no blank line between this line and the line before it.

Obvious printer's errors repaired. Otherwise, unusual spellings and grammar--including hyphenation inconsistencies--were retained as in the original.

P. 253, "Both fine and cleane..."; Although opening quotes usually indicate a new stanza, in this case there was no blank line between this line and the line before it.

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