Chapter IV: Part 4

From Mullion we went on to Gunwalloe. Its church, "small and old," as Charles had depreciatingly said, had been so painfully "restored," and looked so bran-new and uninteresting that we contented ourselves with a distant look. It was close to the sea--probably built on the very spot where its pious founder had been cast ashore. The one curious point about it was the detached belfry, some yards distant from the church itself. It sat alone in a little cove, down which a sluggish river crawled quietly seaward. A sweet quiet place, but haunted, as usual, by tales of cruel shipwrecks--of sailors huddled for hours on a bit of rock just above the waves, till a boat could put out and save the few survivors; of sea treasures continually washed ashore from lost ships--Indian corn, coffee, timber, dollars--many are still found in the sand after a storm. And one treasure more, of which the recollection is still kept at Gunwalloe, "a little dead baby in its cap and night-gown, with a necklace of coral beads."

After this our road turned inland. Our good horse, with the dogged persistency of Cornish horses and Cornish men, plodded on mile after mile. Sometimes for an hour or more we did not meet a living soul; then we came upon a stray labourer, or passed through a village where healthy-looking children, big-eyed, brown-faced, and dirty-handed, picturesque if not pretty, stared at us from cottage doors, or from the gates of cottage gardens full of flowers and apples.

Those apples! They were a picture. Hungry and thirsty, we could not resist them. After passing several trees, hung thickly with delicious fruit, we attacked the owner of one of them, a comely young woman, with a baby in her arms and another at her gown.

"Oh yes, ma'am, you may have as many apples as you like, if your young ladies will go and get them."

And while they did it, she stood talking by the carriage door, pouring out to me her whole domestic history with a simple frankness worthy of the golden age.

"No, really I couldn't," putting back my payment--little enough-- for the splendid basket of apples which the girls brought back in triumph. "This is such a good apple year; the pigs would get them if the young ladies didn't. You're kindly welcome to them--well then, if you are determined, say sixpence."

On which magnificent "sixpenn'orth," we lived for days! Indeed I think we brought some of it home as a specimen of Cornish fruit and Cornish liberality.

Helstone was reached at last, and we were not sorry for rest and food in the old-fashioned inn, whence we could look out of window, and contemplate the humours of the little town, which doubtless considered itself a very great one. It was market day, and the narrow street was thronged with beasts and men--the latter as sober as the former, which spoke well for Cornwall. Sober and civil too was every one we addressed in asking our way to the house of our unknown friend, whose only address we had was Helstone. But he seemed well known in the town, though neither a rich man, nor a great man, nor--No, I cannot say he was not a clever man, for in his own line, mechanical engineering, he must have been exceedingly clever. And he was what people call "a great character;" would have made such an admirable study for a novelist, manipulated into an unrecognisable ideal--the only way in which it is fair to put people in books. When I saw him I almost regretted that I write novels no more.

We passed through the little garden--all ablaze with autumn colour, every inch utilised for either flowers, vegetables, or fruit--went into the parlour, sent our cards and waited the result.

In two minutes our friend appeared, and gave us such a welcome! But to explain it I must trench a little upon the sanctities of private life, and tell the story of this honest Cornishman. It will not harm him.

When still young he went to Brazil, and was employed by an English gold-mining company there, for some years. Afterwards he joined an engineering firm, and superintended dredging, the erection of saw-mills, &c., finally building a lighthouse, of which latter work he had the sole charge, and was exceedingly proud. His conscientiousness, probity, and entire reliableness made him most valuable to the firm; whom he served faithfully for many years. When they, as well as himself, returned to England, he still kept up a correspondence with them, preserving towards every member of the family the most enthusiastic regard and devotion.

He rushed into the parlour, a tall, gaunt, middle-aged man, with a shrewd, kindly face, which beamed all over with delight, as he began shaking hands indiscriminately, saying how kind it was of us to come, and how welcome we were.

It was explained which of us he had specially to welcome, the others being only humble appendages, friends of the family, this well-beloved family, whose likenesses for two generations we saw everywhere about the room.

"Yes, miss, there they all are, your dear grandfather" (alas, only a likeness now!), "your father, and your uncle. They were all so good to me, and I would do anything for them, or for any one of their name. If I got a message that they wanted me for anything, I'd be off to London, or to Brazil, or anywhere, in half-an-hour."

And he really looked as if he would.

"But what will you take?" added the good man when the rapture and excitement of the moment had a little subsided, and his various questions as to the well-being of "the family" had been asked and answered. "You have dined, you say, but you'll have a cup of tea. My wife (that's the little maid I used to talk to your father about, miss; I always told him I wouldn't stay in Brazil, I must go back to England and marry my little maid), my wife makes the best cup of tea in all Cornwall. Here she is!"

And there entered, in afternoon gown and cap, probably just put on, a middle-aged, but still comely matron, who insisted that, even at this early hour--3 P.M.--to get a cup of tea for us was "no trouble at all."

"Indeed, she wouldn't think anything a trouble, no more than I should, miss, if it was for your family. They never forget me, nor I them."

It was here suggested that they were not a "forgetting" family. Nor was he a man likely to be soon forgotten. While the cup of tea, which proved to be a most sumptuous meal, was preparing, he took us all over his house, which was full of foreign curiosities, and experimental inventions. One, I remember, being a musical instrument, a sort of organ, which he had begun making when a mere boy, and taken with him all the way to Brazil and back. It had now found refuge in the little room he called his "workshop," which was filled with odds and ends that would have been delightful to a mechanical mind. He expounded them with enthusiasm, and we tried not to betray an ignorance, which in some of us would have been a sort of hereditary degradation.

"Ah! they were clever--your father and your uncle!--and how proud we all were when we finished our lighthouse, and got the Emperor to light it up for the first time. Look here, ladies, what do you think this is?"

He took out a small parcel, and solemnly unwrapped from it fold after fold of paper, till he came to the heart of it--a small wax candle!

"This was the candle the Emperor used to light our lighthouse. I've kept it for nearly thirty years, and I'll keep it as long as I live. Every year on the anniversary of the day I light it, drink his Majesty's health, and the health of all your family, miss, and then I put it out again. So"--carefully re-wrapping the relic in its numerous envelopes--"so I hope it will last my time."

Here the mistress came behind her good man, and they exchanged a smile--the affectionate smile of two who had never been more than two, Darby and Joan, but all sufficient to each other. She announced that tea was ready. And such a tea! How we got through it I hardly know, but travelling is hungry work, and the viands were delicious. The beneficence of our kind hosts, however, was not nearly done.

"Come, ladies, I'll show you my garden, and--(give me a basket and the grape-scissors,)" added he in a conjugal aside. Which resulted in our carrying away with us the biggest bunches in the whole vinery, as well as a quantity of rosy apples, stuffed into every available pocket and bag.

"Nonsense, nonsense," was the answer to vain remonstrances. "D'ye think I wouldn't give the best of everything I had to your family? and so would my missis too. How your father used to laugh at me about my little maid! But he understood it for all that. Oh yes, I'm glad I came home. And now your father and your uncle are home too, and perhaps some day they'll come to see me down here--wouldn't it be a proud day for me! You'll tell them so?"

It was touching, and rare as touching, this passionate personal fidelity. It threw us back, at least such of us as were sentimentally inclined, upon that something in Cornish nature which found its exposition in Arthur and his faithful knights, down to "bold Sir Bedevere," and apparently, is still not lost in Cornwall.

With a sense of real regret, feeling that it would be long ere we might meet his like--such shrewd simplicity, earnest enthusiasm, and exceeding faithfulness--we bade good-bye to the honest man; leaving him and his wife standing at their garden-gate, an elderly Adam and Eve, desiring nothing outside their own little paradise. Which of us could say more, or as much?

Gratefully we "talked them over," as we drove on through the pretty country round Helstone--inland country; for we had no time to go and see the Loe Pool, a small lake, divided from the sea by a bar of sand. This is supposed to be the work of the Cornwall man-demon, Tregeagle; and periodically cut through, with solemn ceremonial, by the Mayor of Helstone, when the "meeting of the waters," fresh and salt, is said to be an extremely curious sight. But we did not see it, nor yet Nonsloe House, close by, which is held by the tenure of having to provide a boat and nets whenever the Prince of Wales or the Duke of Cornwall wishes to fish in the Loe Pool. A circumstance which has never happened yet, certainly!

Other curiosities _en route_ we also missed, the stones of Tremenkeverne, half a ton each, used as missiles in a notable fight between two saints, St. Just of the Land's End, and St. Keverne of the Lizard, and still lying in a field to prove the verity of the legend. Also the rock of Goldsithney, where, when the "fair land of Lyonesse" was engulfed by the sea, an ancestor of the Trevelyans saved himself by swimming his horse, and landing; and various other remarkable places, with legends attached, needing much credulity, or imagination, to believe in.

But, fearing to be benighted ere reaching Marazion, we passed them all, and saw nothing more interesting than the ruins of disused tin mines, which Charles showed us, mournfully explaining how the mining business had of late years drifted away from Cornwall, and how hundreds of the once thriving community had been compelled to emigrate or starve. As we neared Marazion, these melancholy wrecks with their little hillocks of mining debris rose up against the evening sky, the image of desolation. And then St. Michael's Mount, the picture in little of Mont St. Michel, in Normandy, appeared in the middle of Mount's Bay. Lastly, after a gorgeous sunset, in a golden twilight and silvery moonlight, we entered Marazion;-and found it, despite its picturesque name, the most commonplace little town imaginable!

We should have regretted our rash decision, and gone on to Penzance, but for the hearty welcome given us at a most comfortable and home-like inn, which determined us to keep to our first intention, and stay.

So, after our habit of making the best of things, we walked down to the ugly beach, and investigated the dirty-looking bay--in the lowest of all low tides, with a soppy, sea-weedy causeway running across to St. Michael's Mount. By advice of Charles, we made acquaintance with an old boatman he knew, a Norwegian who had drifted hither--shipwrecked, I believe--settled down and married an English woman, but whose English was still of the feeblest kind. However, he had an honest face; so we engaged him to take us out bathing early to-morrow.

"And to-night, ladies?" suggested the faithful Charles. "Wouldn't you like to row round the Mount?--When you've had your tea, I'll come back for you, and help you down to the shore--it's rather rough, but nothing like what you have done, ma'am," added he encouragingly. "And it will be bright moonlight, and the Mount will look so fine."

So, the spirit of adventure conquering our weariness, we went. When I think how it looked next morning--the small, shallow bay, with its toy-castle in the centre, I am glad our first vision of it was under the glamour of moonlight, with the battlemented rock throwing dark shadows across the shimmering sea. In the mysterious beauty of that night row round the Mount, we could imagine anything; its earliest inhabitant, the giant Cormoran, killed by that "valiant Cornishman," the illustrious Jack; the lovely St. Keyne, a king's daughter, who came thither on pilgrimage; and, passing down from legend to history, Henry de la Pomeroy, who, being taken prisoner, caused himself to be bled to death in the Castle; Sir John Arundel, slain on the sands, and buried in the Chapel; Perkin Warbeck's unfortunate wife, who took refuge at St. Michael's shrine, but was dragged thence. And so on, and so on, through the centuries, to the family of St. Aubyn, who bought it in 1660, and have inhabited it ever since. "Very nice people," we heard they were; who have received here the Queen, the Prince of Wales, and other royal personages. What a contrast to the legendary Cormoran!

Yet, looking up as we rowed under the gloomy rock, we could fancy his giant ghost sitting there, on the spot where he killed his wife, for bringing in her apron greenstone, instead of granite, to build the chapel with. Which being really built of greenstone the story must be true! What a pleasure it is to be able to believe anything!

Some of us could have stayed out half the night, floating along in the mild soft air and dreamy moonlight, which made even the commonplace little town look like a fairy scene, and exalted St. Michael's Mount into a grand fortress, fit for its centuries of legendary lore--but others preferred going to bed.

So we landed, and retired. Not however without taking a long look out of the window upon the bay, which now, at high tide, was one sheet of rippling moon-lit water, with the grim old Mount, full of glimmering lights like eyes, sitting silent in the midst of the silent sea.

DAY THE TENTH

I cannot advise Marazion as a bathing place. What a down-come from the picturesque vision of last night, to a small ugly fishy-smelling beach, which seemed to form a part of the town and its business, and was overlooked from everywhere! Yet on it two or three family groups were evidently preparing for a dip, or rather a wade of about a quarter of a mile in exceedingly dirty sea water.

"This will never do," we said to our old Norwegian. "You must row us to some quiet cove along the shore, and away from the town."

He nodded his head, solemn and mute as the dumb boatman of dead Elaine, rowed us out seaward for about half-a-mile, and then proceeded to fasten the boat to a big stone, and walk ashore. The water still did not come much above his knees--he seemed quite indifferent to it. But we?

Well, we could but do at Rome as the Romans do. Toilette in an open boat was evidently the custom of the country. And the sun was warm, the sea safe and shallow. Indeed, so rapidly did it subside, that by the time the bath was done, we were aground, and had to call at the top of our voices to our old man, who sat, with his back to us, dim in the distance, on another big stone, calmly smoking the pipe of peace.

"We'll not try this again," was the unanimous resolve, as, after politely declining a suggestion that "the ladies should walk ashore--" did he think we were amphibious?--we got ourselves floated off at last, and rowed to the nearest landing point, the entrance to St. Michael's Mount.

Probably nowhere in England is found the like of this place. Such a curious mingling of a mediæval fortress and modern residence; of antiquarian treasures and everyday business; for at the foot of the rock is a fishing village of about thirty cottages, which carries on a thriving trade; and here also is a sort of station for the tiny underground-railway, which worked by a continuous chain, fulfils the very necessary purpose (failing Giant Cormoran, and wife) of carrying up coals, provisions, luggage, and all other domestic necessaries to the hill top.

Thither we climbed by a good many weary steps, and thought, delightful as it may be to dwell on the top of a rock in the midst of the sea, like eagles in an eyrie, there are certain advantages in living on a level country road, or even in a town street. How in the world do the St. Aubyns manage when they go out to dinner? Two years afterwards, when I read in the paper that one of the daughters of the house, leaning over the battlements, had lost her balance and fallen down, mercifully unhurt, to the rocky slope below--the very spot where we to-day sat so quietly gazing out on the lovely sea view--I felt with a shudder that on the whole, it would be a trying thing to bring up a young family on St. Michael's Mount.

Still, generation after generation of honourable St. Aubyns have brought up their families there, and oh! what a beautiful spot it is! How fresh, and yet mild blew the soft sea-wind outside of it, and inside, what endless treasures there were for the archæological mind! The chapel alone was worth a morning's study, even though shown--odd anachronism--by a footman in livery, who pointed out with great gusto the entrance to a vault discovered during the last repairs, where was found the skeleton of a large man--his bones only--no clue whatever as to who he was or when imprisoned there. The "Jeames" of modern days told us this tale with a noble indifference. Nothing of the kind was likely to happen to him.

Further still we were fortunate enough to penetrate, and saw the Chevy Chase Hall, with its cornice of hunting scenes, the drawing-room, the school-room--only fancy learning lessons there, amidst the veritable evidence of the history one was studying! And perhaps the prettiest bit of it all was our young guide, herself a St. Aubyn, with her simple grace and sweet courtesy, worthy of one of the fair ladies worshipped by King Arthur's knights.

We did not like encroaching on her kindness, though we could have stayed all day, admiring the curious things she showed us. So we descended the rock, and crossed the causeway, now dry, but very rough walking--certainly St. Michael's Mount has its difficulties as a modern dwelling-house--and went back to our inn. For, having given our horse a forenoon's rest, we planned a visit to that spot immortalised by nursery rhyme--

"As I was going to St. Ives
I met a man with seven wives.
Each wife had seven sacks;
Each sack had seven cats;
Each cat had seven kits;
Kits, cats, sacks, and wives,--
How many were there going to St. Ives?"

--One; and after we had been there, we felt sure he never went again!

There were two roads, we learnt, to that immortal town; one very good, but dull; the other bad--and beautiful. We chose the latter, and never repented.

Nor, in passing through Penzance, did we repent not having taken up our quarters there. It was pretty, but so terribly "genteel," so extremely civilised. Glancing up at the grand hotel, we thought with pleasure of our old-fashioned inn at Marazion, where the benign waiter took quite a fatherly interest in our proceedings, even to giving us for dinner our very own blackberries, gathered yesterday on the road, and politely hindering another guest from helping himself to half a dishful, as "they belonged to the young ladies." Truly, there are better things in life than fashionable hotels.

But the neighbourhood of Penzance is lovely. Shrubs and flowers such as one sees on the shores of the Mediterranean grew and flourished in cottage-gardens, and the forest trees we drove under, whole avenues of them, were very fine; gentlemen's seats appeared here and there, surrounded with the richest vegetation, and commanding lovely views. As the road gradually mounted upwards, we saw, clear as in a panorama, the whole coast from the Lizard Point to the Land's End,--which we should behold to-morrow.

For, hearing that every week-day about a hundred tourists in carriages, carts, and omnibuses, usually flocked thither, we decided that the desire of our lives, the goal of our pilgrimage, should be visited by us on a Sunday. We thought that to drive us thither in solitary Sabbatic peace would be fully as good for Charles's mind and morals as to hang all day idle about Marazion; and he seemed to think so himself. Therefore, in prospect of to-morrow, he dealt very tenderly with his horse to-day, and turned us out to walk up the heaviest hills, of which there were several, between Penzance and Castle-an-Dinas.

"There it is," he said at last, stopping in the midst of a wide moor and pointing to a small building, sharp against the sky. "The carriage can't get further, but you can go on, ladies, and I'll stop and gather some blackberries for you."

For brambles, gorse bushes, and clumps of fading heather, with one or two small stunted trees, were now the only curiosities of this, King Arthur's famed hunting castle, and hunting ground, which spread before us for miles and miles. Passing a small farm-house, we made our way to the building Charles pointed out, standing on the highest ridge of the promontory, whose furthest point is the Land's End. Standing there, we could see--or could have seen but that the afternoon had turned grey and slightly misty--the ocean on both sides. Inland, the view seemed endless. Roughtor and Brown Willy, two Dartmoor hills, are said to be visible sometimes. Nearer, little white dots of houses show the mining districts of Redruth and Camborne.

But here, all was desolate solitude. A single wayfarer, looking like a working man in his Sunday best going to visit friends, but evidently tired, as if he had walked for miles, just glanced at us, and passed on. We stood, all alone, on the very spot where many a time must have stood King Arthur, Queen Guinevere, Sir Launcelot, and the other knights--or the real human beings, whether barbarian or not, who formed the originals of those mythical personages.

All had vanished now. Nothing was left but a common-place little tower, built up of the fragments of the old castle, and a wide, pathless moor, over which the wind sighed, and the mist crept. No memorial whatever of King Arthur, except the tradition--which time and change have been powerless to annihilate--that such a man once existed. The long vitality which the legend keeps proves that he must have been a remarkable man in his day. Romance itself cannot exist without a foundation in reality.

So I preached to my incredulous juniors, who threw overboard King Arthur and took to blackberry-gathering; and to conversation with a most comely Cornishwoman, milking the prettiest of Cornish cows in the lonely farm-yard, which was the only sign of humanity for miles and miles. We admired herself and her cattle; we drank her milk, offering for it the usual payment. But the picturesque milkmaid shook her head and demanded just double what even the dearest of London milk-sellers would have asked for the quantity. Which sum we paid in silence, and I only record the fact here in order to state that spite of our foreboding railway friend at Falmouth, this was the only instance in which we were ever "taken in," or in the smallest degree imposed upon, in Cornwall.

Another hour, slowly driving down the gradual slope of the country, through a mining district much more cheerful than that beyond Marazion. The mines were all apparently in full work, and the mining villages were pretty, tidy, and cosy-looking, even picturesque. Approaching St. Ives the houses had quite a foreign look, but when we descended to the town, its dark, narrow streets, pervaded by a "most ancient and fish-like smell," were anything but attractive.

As was our hotel, where, as a matter of duty, we ordered tea, but doubted if we should enjoy it, and went out again to see what little there seemed to be seen, puzzling our way through the gloomy and not too fragrant streets, till at last in despair we stopped a bland, elderly, Methodist-minister-looking gentleman, and asked him the way to the sea.

He eyed us over. "You're strangers here, ma'am?"

I owned the humbling fact, as the inhabitant of St. Ives must doubtless consider it.

"And is it the pilchard fishery you want to see? It is just beginning. A few pilchards have been seen already. There are the boats, the fishermen are all getting ready. It's a fine sight to see them start. Would you like to come and look at them?"

He had turned back and was walking with us down the street, pointing out everything that occurred to him as noticeable, in the kindest and civilest way. When we apologised for troubling him, and would have parted company, our friend made no attempt to go.

"Oh, I've nothing at all to do, except"--he took out the biggest and most respectable of watches--"except to attend a prayer-meeting at half-past six. I should have time to show you the town; we think it is a very nice little town. I ought to know it; I've lived in it, boy and man for thirty-seven years. But now I have left my business to my sons, and I just go about and amuse myself, looking into the shop now and then just for curiosity. You must have seen my old shop, ladies, if you came down that street."

Which he named, and also gave us his own name, which we had seen over the shop door, but I shall not record either. Not that I think the honest man is ever likely to read such "light" literature as this book, or to recall the three wanderers to whom he was so civil and kind, and upon whom he poured out an amount of local and personal facts, which we listened to--as a student of human nature is prone to do--with an amused interest in which the comic verged on the pathetic. How large to each man seems his own little world, and what child-like faith he has in its importance to other people! I shall always recall our friend at St. Ives, with his prayer-meetings, his chapel-goings--I concluded he was a Methodist, a sect very numerous in Cornwall--his delight in his successful shop and well-brought-up sons, who managed it so well, leaving him to enjoy his _otium cum dignitate_--no doubt a municipal dignity, for he showed us the Town Hall with great gusto. Evidently to his honest, simple soul, St. Ives was the heart of the world.

By and by again he pulled out the turnip-like watch. "Just ten minutes to get to my prayer-meeting, and I never like to be late, I have been a punctual man all my life, ma'am," added he, half apologetically, till I suggested that this was probably the cause of his peace and success. Upon which he smiled, lifted his hat with a benign adieu, hoped we had liked St. Ives--we had liked his company at any rate--and with a final pointing across the street, "There's my shop, ladies, if you would care to look at it," trotted away to his prayer-meeting.

I believe the neighbourhood of St. Ives, especially Tregenna, its ancient mansion transformed into an hotel, is exceedingly pretty, but night was falling fast, and we saw nothing. Speedily we despatched a most untempting meal, and hurried Charles's departure, lest we should be benighted, as we nearly were, during the long miles of straight and unlovely road--the good road--between here and Penzance. We had done our duty, we had seen the place, but as, in leaving it behind us, we laughingly repeated the nursery rhyme, we came to the conclusion that the man who was "_going_ to St. Ives" was the least fortunate of all those notable individuals.

DAY THE ELEVENTH

The last thing before retiring, we had glanced out on a gloomy sea, a starless sky, pitch darkness, broken only by those moving lights on St. Michael's Mount, and thought anxiously of the morrow. It would be hard, if after journeying thus far and looking forward to it so many years, the day on which we went to the Land's End should turn out a wet day! Still "hope on, hope ever," as we used to write in our copy-books. Some of us, I think, still go on writing it in empty air, and will do so till the hand is dust.

It was with a feeling almost of solemnity that we woke and looked out on the dawn, grey and misty, but still not wet. To be just on the point of gaining the wish of a life-time, however small, is a fact rare enough to have a certain pathos in it. We slept again, and trusted for the best, which by breakfast-time really came, in flickering sun-gleams, and bits of hopeful blue sky. We wondered for the last time, as we had wondered for half a century, "what the Land's End would be like," and then started, rather thoughtful than merry, to find out the truth of the case.

Glad as we were to have for our expedition this quiet Sunday instead of a tumultuous week day, conscience smote us in driving through Penzance, with the church-bells ringing, and the people streaming along to morning service, all in their Sunday best. Perhaps we might manage to go to afternoon church at Sennen, or St. Sennen's, which we knew by report, as the long-deceased father of a family we were acquainted with had been curate there early in the century, and we had promised faithfully "just to go and look at the old place."

But one can keep Sunday sometimes even outside church-doors. I shall never forget the Sabbatic peace of that day; those lonely and lovely roads, first rich with the big trees and plentiful vegetation about Penzance, then gradually growing barer and barer as we drove along the high promontory which forms the extreme point westward of our island. The way along which so many tourist-laden vehicles pass daily was now all solitary; we scarcely saw a soul, except perhaps a labourer leaning over a gate in his decent Sunday clothes, or two or three children trotting to school or church, with their books under their arms. Unquestionably Cornwall is a respectable, sober-minded county; religious-minded too, whether Methodist, Quaker, or other nonconformist sects, of which there are a good many, or decent, conservative Church of England.

We passed St. Buryan's--a curious old church founded on the place where an Irishwoman, Saint Buriana, is said to have made her hermitage. A few stray cottages comprised the whole village. There was nothing special to see, except to drink in the general atmosphere of peace and sunshine and solitude, till we came to Treryn, the nearest point to the celebrated Logan or rocking-stone.

From childhood we had read about it; the most remarkable specimen in England of those very remarkable stones, whether natural or artificial, who can decide?

"Which the touch of a finger alone sets moving,
But all earth's powers cannot shake from their base."

Not quite true, this; since in 1824 a rash and foolish Lieutenant Goldsmith (let his name be gibbeted for ever!) did come with a boat's crew, and by main force remove the Logan a few inches from the point on which it rests. Indignant justice very properly compelled him, at great labour and pains, to put it back again, but it has never rocked properly since.

By Charles's advice we took a guide, a solemn-looking youth, who stalked silently ahead of us along the "hedges," which, as at the Lizard, furnished the regular path across the fields coastwards. Soon the gleaming circle of sea again flashed upon us, from behind a labyrinth of rocks, whence we met a couple of tourists returning.

"You'll find it a pretty stiff climb to the Logan, ladies," said one of them in answer to a question.

And so we should have done, indeed, had not our guide's hand been much readier than his tongue. I, at least, should never have got even so far as that little rock-nest where I located myself--a somewhat anxious-minded old hen--and watched my chickens climb triumphantly that enormous mass of stone which we understood to be the Logan.

"Now, watch it rock!" they shouted across the dead stillness, the lovely solitude of sky and sea. And I suppose it did rock, but must honestly confess _I_ could not see it stir a single inch.

However, it was a big stone, a very big stone, and the stones around it were equally huge and most picturesquely thrown together. Also--delightful to my young folks!--they furnished the most adventurous scramble that heart could desire. I alone felt a certain relief when we were all again on smooth ground, with no legs or arms broken.

The cliff-walk between the Logan and the Land's End is said to be one of the finest in England for coast scenery. Treryn or Treen Dinas, Pardeneck Point, and Tol Pedn Penwith had been named as places we ought to see, but this was impracticable. We had to content ourselves with a dull inland road, across a country gradually getting more barren and ugly, till we found ourselves suddenly at what seemed the back-yard of a village public-house, where two or three lounging stable-men came forward to the carriage, and Charles jumped down from his box.

"You can get out now, ladies. This is the Land's End."

"Oh!"

I forbear to translate the world of meaning implied in that brief exclamation.

"Let us go in and get something. Perhaps we shall admire the place more when we have ceased to be hungry."

The words of wisdom were listened to; and we spent our first quarter of an hour at the Land's End in attacking a skeleton "remain" of not too daintily-cooked beef, and a cavernous cheese, in a tiny back parlour of the--let me give it its right name--First and Last Inn, of Great Britain.

"We never provide for Sunday," said the waitress, responding to a sympathetic question on the difficulty it must be to get food here. "It's very seldom any tourists come on a Sunday."

At which we felt altogether humbled; but in a few minutes more our contrition passed into sovereign content.

We went out of doors, upon the narrow green plateau in front of the house, and then we recognised where we were--standing at the extreme end of a peninsula, with a long line of rocks running out still further into the sea. That "great and wide sea, wherein are moving things innumerable," the mysterious sea "kept in the hollow of His hand," who is Infinity, and looking at which, in the intense solitude and silence, one seems dimly to guess at what Infinity may be. Any one who wishes to go to church for once in the Great Temple which His hands have builded, should spend a Sunday at the Land's End.

At first, our thought had been, What in the world shall we do here for two mortal hours! Now, we wished we had had two whole days. A sunset, a sunrise, a star-lit night, what would they not have been in this grand lonely place--almost as lonely as a ship at sea? It would be next best to finding ourselves in the middle of the Atlantic.

But this bliss could not be; so we proceeded to make the best of what we had. The bright day was darkening, and a soft greyness began to creep over land and sea. No, not soft, that is the very last adjective applicable to the Land's End. Even on that calm day there was a fresh wind--there must be always wind--and the air felt sharper and more salt than any sea-air I ever knew. Stimulating too, so that one's nerves were strung to the highest pitch of excitement. We felt able to do anything, without fear and without fatigue. So that when a guide came forward--a regular man-of-war's-man he looked--we at once resolved to adventure along the line of rocks, seaward, "out as far as anybody was accustomed to go."

"Ay, ay; I'll take you, ladies. That is--the young ladies might go--but you--" eying me over with his keen sailor's glance, full of honesty and good humour, "you're pretty well on in years, ma'am."

Laughing, I told him how far on, but that I was able to do a good deal yet. He laughed too.

"Oh, I've taken ladies much older than you. One the other day was nearly seventy. So we'll do our best, ma'am. Come along."

He offered a rugged, brown hand, as firm and steady as a mast, to hold by, and nothing could exceed the care and kindliness with which he guided every step of every one of us, along that perilous path, that is, perilous except for cautious feet and steady heads.

"Take care, young ladies. If you make one false step, you are done for," said our guide, composedly as he pointed to the boiling whirl of waters below.

Still, though a narrow and giddy path, there was a path, and the exploit, though a little risky, was not fool-hardy. We should have been bitterly sorry not to have done it--not to have stood for one grand ten minutes, where in all our lives we may never stand again, at the farthest point where footing is possible, gazing out upon that magnificent circle of sea which sweeps over the submerged "land of Lyonesse," far, far away, into the wide Atlantic.

There were just two people standing with us, clergymen evidently, and one, the guide told us, was "the parson at St. Sennen." We spoke to him, as people do speak, instinctively, when mutually watching such a scene, and by and by we mentioned the name of the long-dead curate of St. Sennen's.

The "parson" caught instantly at the name.

"Mr. ----? Oh, yes, my father knew him quite well. He used constantly to walk across from Sennen to our house, and take us children long rambles across the cliffs, with a volume of Southey or Wordsworth under his arm. He was a fine young fellow in those days, I have heard, and an excellent clergyman. And he afterwards married a very nice girl from the north somewhere."

"Yes;" we smiled. The "nice girl" was now a sweet silver-haired little lady of nearly eighty; the "fine young fellow" had long since departed; and the boy was this grave middle-aged gentleman, who remembered both as a tradition of his youth. What a sermon it all preached, beside this eternal rock, this ever-moving, never-changing sea!

But time was passing--how fast it does pass, minutes, ay, and years! We bade adieu to our known unknown friend, and turned our feet backwards, cautiously as ever, stopping at intervals to listen to the gossip of our guide.

"Yes, ladies, that's the spot--you may see the hoof-mark--where General Armstrong's horse fell over; he just slipped off in time, but the poor beast was drowned. And here, over that rock, happened the most curious thing. I wouldn't have believed it myself, only I knew a man that saw it with his own eyes. Once a bullock fell off into the pool below there--just look, ladies." (We did look, into a perfect Maëlstrom of boiling waves.) "Everybody thought he was drowned, till he was seen swimming about unhurt. They fished him up, and exhibited him as a curiosity."

And again, pointing to a rock far out in the sea.

"That's the Brisons. Thirty years ago a ship went to pieces there, and the captain and his wife managed to climb on to that rock. They held on there for two days and a night, before a boat could get at them. At last they were taken off one at a time, with rockets and a rope; the wife first. But the rope slipped and she fell into the water. She was pulled out in a minute or so, and rowed ashore, but they durst not tell her husband she was drowned. I was standing on the beach at Whitesand Bay when the boat came in. I was only a lad, but I remember it well, and her too lifted out all dripping and quite dead. She was such a fine woman."

"And the captain?"

"They went back for him, and got him off safe, telling him nothing. But when he found she was dead he went crazy-like--kept for ever saying, 'She saved my life, she saved my life,' till he was taken away by his friends. Look out, ma'am, mind your footing; just here a lady slipped and broke her leg a week ago. I had to carry her all the way to the hotel. I shouldn't like to carry you."

We all smiled at the comical candour of the honest sailor, who proceeded to give us bits of his autobiography. He was Cornish born, but had seen a deal of the world as an A.B. on board her Majesty's ship _Agamemnon_.

"Of course you have heard of the _Agamemnon_, ma'am. I was in her off Balaklava. You remember the Crimean war?"

Yes, I did. His eyes brightened as we discussed names and places once so familiar, belonging to that time, which now seems so far back as to be almost historical.

"Then you know what a winter we had, and what a summer afterwards. I came home invalided, and didn't attempt the service afterwards; but I never thought I should come home at all. Yes, it's a fine place the Land's End, though the air is so strong that it kills some folks right off. Once an invalid gentleman came, and he was dead in a fortnight. But I'm not dead yet, and I stop here mostly all the year round."

He sniffed the salt air and smiled all over his weather-beaten face--keen, bronzed, blue-eyed, like one of the old Vikings. He was a fine specimen of a true British tar. When, having seen all we could, we gave him his small honorarium, he accepted it gratefully, and insisted on our taking in return a memento of the place in the shape of a stone weighing about two pounds, glittering with ore, and doubtless valuable, but ponderous. Oh, the trouble it gave me to carry it home, and pack and unpack it among my small luggage! But I did bring it home, and I keep it still in remembrance of the Land's End, and of the honest sailor of H.M.S. _Agamemnon_.

So all was over. We could dream of an unknown Land's End no more. It became now a real place, of which the reality, though different from the imagination, was at least no disappointment. How few people in attaining a life-long desire can say as much!

Our only regret, an endurable one now, was that we had not carried out our original plan of staying some days there--tourist-haunted, troubled days they might have been, but the evenings and mornings would have been glorious. With somewhat heavy hearts we summoned Charles and the carriage, for already a misty drift of rain began sweeping over the sea.

"Still, we must see Whitesand Bay," said one of us, recalling a story a friend had once told how, staying at Land's End, she crossed the bay alone in a blinding storm, took refuge at the coastguard station, where she was hospitably received, and piloted back with most chivalric care by a coastguard, who did not tell her till their journey's end that he had left at home a wife, and a baby just an hour old.

No such romantic adventure befell us. We only caught a glimmer of the bay through drizzling rain, which by the time we reached Sennen village had become a regular downpour. Evidently, we could do no more that day, which was fast melting into night.

"We'll go home," was the sad resolve, glad nevertheless that we had a comfortable "home" to go to.

So closing the carriage and protecting ourselves as well as we could from the driving rain, we went forward, passing the Quakers' burial ground, where is said to be one of the finest views in Cornwall; the Nine Maidens, a circle of Druidical stones, and many other interesting things, without once looking at or thinking of them.

Half a mile from Marazion the rain ceased, and a light like that of the rising moon began to break through the clouds. What a night it might be, or might have been, could we have stayed at the Land's End!

That ghostly "might have been!" It is in great things as in small, the worry, the torment, the paralysing burden of life. Away with it! We have done our best to be happy, and we have been happy. We have seen the Land's End.

DAY THE TWELFTH

Monday morning. Black Monday we were half inclined to call it, knowing that by the week's end our travels must be over and done, and that if we wished still to see all we had planned, we must inevitably next morning return to civilisation and railways, a determination which involved taking this night "a long, a last farewell" of our comfortable carriage and our faithful Charles.

"But it needn't be until night," said he, evidently loth to part from his ladies. "If I get back to Falmouth by daylight to-morrow morning, master will be quite satisfied. I can take you wherever you like to-day."

"And the horse?"

"Oh, he shall get a good feed and a rest till the middle of the night, then he'll do well enough. We shall have the old moon after one o'clock to get home by. Between Penzance and Falmouth it's a good road, though rather lonely."

I should think it was, in the "wee hours" by the dim light of a waning moon. But Charles seemed to care nothing about it, so we said no more, but decided to take the drive--our last drive.

Our minds were perplexed between Botallack Mine, the Gurnard's Head, Lamorna Cove, and several other places, which we were told we must on no account miss seeing, the first especially. Some of us, blessed with scientific relatives, almost dreaded returning home without having seen a single Cornish mine; others, lovers of scenery, longed for more of that magnificent coast. But finally, a meek little voice carried the day.

"I was so disappointed--more than I liked to say--when it rained, and I couldn't get my shells for our bazaar. How shall I ever get them now? If it wouldn't trouble anybody very much, mightn't we go again to Whitesand Bay?"

A plan not wholly without charm. It was a heavenly day; to spend it in delicious idleness on that wide sweep of sunshiny sand would be a rest for the next day's fatigue. Besides, consolatory thought! there would be no temptation to put on miners' clothes, and go dangling in a basket down to the heart of the earth, as the Princess of Wales was reported to have done. The pursuit of knowledge may be delightful, but some of us owned to a secret preference for _terra firma_ and the upper air. We resolved to face opprobrium, and declare boldly we had "no time" (needless to add no inclination) to go and see Botallack Mine. The Gurnard's Head cost us a pang to miss; but then we should catch a second view of the Land's End. Yes, we would go to Whitesand Bay.

It was a far shorter journey in sunshine than in rain, even though we made various divergencies for blackberries and other pleasures. Never had the sky looked bluer or the sea brighter, and much we wished that we could have wandered on in dreamy peace, day after day, or even gone through England, gipsy-fashion, in a house upon wheels, which always seemed to me the very ideal of travelling.

We reached Sennen only too soon. Pretty little Sennen, with its ancient church and its new school house, where the civil schoolmaster gave me some ink to write a post-card for those to whom even the post-mark "Sennen" would have a touching interest, and where the boys and girls, released for dinner, were running about. Board school pupils, no doubt, weighted with an amount of learning which would have been appalling to their grandfathers and grandmothers, the simple parishioners of the "fine young fellow" half a century ago. As we passed through the village with its pretty cottages and "Lodgings to Let," we could not help thinking what a delightful holiday resort this would be for a large small family, who could be turned out as we were when the carriage could no farther go, on the wide sweep of green common, gradually melting into silvery sand, so fine and soft that it was almost a pleasure to tumble down the slopes, and get up again, shaking yourself like a dog, without any sense of dirt or discomfort. What a paradise for children, who might burrow like rabbits and wriggle about like sand-eels, and never come to any harm!

Without thought of any danger, we began selecting our bathing-place, shallow enough, with long strips of wet shimmering sand to be crossed before reaching even the tiniest waves; when one of us, the cautious one, appealed to an old woman, the only human being in sight.

"Bathe?" she said. "Folks ne'er bathe here. 'Tain't safe."

"Why not? Quicksands?"

She nodded her head. Whether she understood us or not, or whether we quite understood her, I am not sure, and should be sorry to libel such a splendid bathing ground--apparently. But maternal wisdom interposed, and the girls yielded. When, half an hour afterwards, we saw a solitary figure moving on a distant ledge of rock, and a black dot, doubtless a human head, swimming or bobbing about in the sea beneath--maternal wisdom was reproached as arrant cowardice. But the sand was delicious, the sea-wind so fresh, and the sea so bright, that disappointment could not last. We made an encampment of our various impedimenta, stretched ourselves out, and began the search for shells, in which every arm's-length involved a mine of wealth and beauty.

Never except at one place, on the estuary of the Mersey, have I seen a beach made up of shells so lovely in colour and shape; very minute; some being no bigger than a grain of rice or a pin's head. The collecting of them was a fascination. We forgot all the historical interests that ought to have moved us, saw neither Athelstan, King Stephen, King John, nor Perkin Warbeck, each of whom is said to have landed here--what were they to a tiny shell, like that moralised over by Tennyson in "Maud"--"small, but a work divine"? I think infinite greatness sometimes touches one less than infinite littleness--the exceeding tenderness of Nature, or the Spirit which is behind Nature, who can fashion with equal perfectness a starry hemisphere and a glow-worm; an ocean and a little pink shell. The only imperfection in creation seems--oh, strange mystery!--to be man. Why?

But away with moralising, or dreaming, though this was just a day for dreaming, clear, bright, warm, with not a sound except the murmur of the low waves, running in an enormous length--curling over and breaking on the soft sands. Everything was so heavenly calm, it seemed impossible to believe in that terrible scene when the captain and his wife were seen clinging to the Brisons rock, just ahead.