of granite is in the neighbourhood. Pengersick is the remnant of a Tudor castle, in which a gentleman, who had slain a friend in hot blood, immured himself for the rest of his life. Inside of Cuddan Point is Prussia Cove, where a noted smuggler, professedly Mine Host of the King of Prussia, actually built a battery mounting long six-pounder guns, in days when cutters and luggers were heavily armed. Having had the temerity in 1785 to fire upon H.M.S. Fairy, marines and seamen were at once landed, and now scarcely a vestige remains of the redoubt except a low broken mound. At Perranuthnoe (Little Pirans) is the cave into which, according to tradition, the Trelawney swam his white barb, still the cognisance of the family, the only survivor when Lionesse sank beneath the waves. Lychnoscopes, or low side windows, prevail in the district within 15 miles north of the Lizard, in the cruciform churches of Mawgan, Grade, Carey, Llandewednack and Wendrow, being invariably connected with the junction of the rood loft and walls of the chancel and transept. The railway leaving Truro passes by Chace water (4 m.), Scorrier (34 m.), Redruth ("the Druid's town ") (21 m.)., Pool (1 m.), Camborne (13 m.), Gwinnear (24 m.), to Hayle (3 m.)

HAYLE.

The neighbourhood of Hayle is remarkable for sands composed of shells, the towans, which are blown in by the northwest gales in spring. These sandhills, which vary from 100 to 300 feet in height, are supposed to have been increasing ever since the time of the Romans. In 1609 King James I. allowed the people to dig the sands for manure, under high-water mark. Upwards of 5,600,000 cubic feet of these comminuted shells are annually conveyed into the interior. St. Phillack's Church is almost overwhelmed; and at St. Gwythian's is buried a church resembling that of Peranzabuloe. The name of Lelant has some affinity to Les Landes in France. The Arundo arenaria is now suc

cessfully planted to prevent the spread of the sands. The adjoining country is rich in minerals, but desolate and destitute of beauty: on the road to Camborne the ground is strewn with slate, poisonous rubble, iris-tinted refuse of the copper ore, and pierced with tall chimney-shafts. The clack of the enormous revolving wheel, the pant of the engine, the oscillating piston, the grating chain on the skeleton platform, the hoarse rolling of the locomotive, the discoloured streams, and coarse grass and gorse, offer sounds and sights agreeable to neither ear nor eye. Yet under this stony desolation, savage and mournful as it is, lie treasures which would ransom all the kings of the earth. Wealth, to which green wood and pastoral lea can offer no comparison, is hid under this waste,-veins of metal, the best channel of electric agency, and which, in its various uses, make the mines an English Golconda, and one of the chief supports of British strength. And out further on the moor, the motionless tors and stern graniteblocks seen in the misty twilight, stretching away miles upon miles, look like the pillars of a Tadmor-some ruined desert-city, full of the temples of the cruel Druids. Their scarred forms, wonderfully soft and mysterious, under the full hunter's moon, assume a terrible aspect, when the heaven above is black with thunder, and the wild fierce storm-wind wails and shrieks like the voices of fallen spirits, the forked lightning leaps down and splinters into fragments the massive unhewn pillars, and leaves the black imprint of its touch upon the rocks that stood here before man was. And yet that adamantine granite on these moors, whence the slab is hewn to pave the pathways or front the palaces of London, and continue unworn by the passing feet of thousands, or the decay of time-the granite which, at the Land's End, the ceaseless sap of the Atlantic cannot undermine, is gently decomposed by the soft hand of Nature into the china clay of the fragile teacup which we guard from an infant's touch. Even the sterile desert proclaims the glory of the Creator and the wonders of His hand.

The next station, distant 1 miles, is MARAZION (the

island-mart, in allusion to the Mount in the neighbouring bay). The town, situated on the slope of a hill, has constantly been known as Market-Jew; the miners, who will not whistle under ground for fear of the spirits, believing that here the ore was first dug by the Jews who had stood on Calvary when the sun grew dark at noon-day, and were condemned by the Romans to toil in the mines here. The old smelting-houses they call Jew-houses, and the refuse ore occasionally found, Jews' tin; and in the same way the ancient name of the town is often interpreted according to its modern corruption, "the Bitterness of Zion." The miners also believe that the subterranean noises are the work of the "knockers" in the "Attal Sarasin," confounding the Hebrew and the Saracen. Don Quixote alludes to the old tradition of the veneration paid to the Cornish chough, which is believed to embody glorious King Arthur, who, after all, was not wafted from Tintagel to the lake of Camelot. The town was plundered by the French; and in 1549, by Humphrey Arundel of Lanherne and the Cornish rebels. Brassica oloracea is found in the neighbourhood. From this spot to Chyandour the sands have a bluish tinge. Borlase relates a marvellous story of this shore, on what he describes as respectable authority. Having dilated on the sea-magpie, the soldier-crab or hermit-shrimp, which unscrupulously takes possession of a vacant tenement, he describes the close siege laid to an unhappy oyster by a voracious lobster: the closed valves baffled the warrior in black mail for some time, but the creature happening to gape, the enemy, by a flip of his claw, adroitly inserted some little pebbles, which made the oyster an easy prey!

At Porthleven, between 1806 and 1810, eleven ships were wrecked, with the loss of 250 lives and of 300,0007. The chief ornament of the bay is

ST. MICHAEL'S MOUNT.

"Majestic Michael rises, he whose brow

Is crowned with castles, and whose rocky sides
Are clad with dusky ivy; he whose base,
Beat by the storm of ages, stands unmoved
Amidst the wreck of things, the change of times.
That base, encircled by the azure waves,
Was once with verdure clad; the sacred oaks,
Whose awful shades among the Druids strayed
To cut the hallowed mistletoe, and hold

High converse with their gods."-H. Davy.

Bowles has likewise sung of this remarkable hill, finely imagining around it the "sounds of mighty generations past;" its name in Cornish signifies "the gray rock in the wood;" for, once bosomed in wood, the intermediate land, called Lionesse, covered with 140 churches, between St. Michael's and the Scilly Isles, is said to have been overwhelmed by a fearful deluge in the 10th century, like the Irish Lough Neagh, and Plato's isle of Atlantis; and the fishermen averred that, on calm sunny days, far down in the clear blue depths, they could see the towers of a lost city gleaming under the waves. Trees-oak, willow, and hazel— are found now under the sands between the Mount and Penzance. St. Kevin, in the 5th century, came hither as a pilgrim from Ireland. Craggy and barren, a peak of Teneriffe in miniature-on one side a steep precipice, on the other a gentle declivity-St. Michael's Mount is a huge irregular pile of granite rocks and stupendous cliffs, dappled with a few firs, a mile in circuit, and 231 feet high from the sea-level to the platform of the tower. Granite forms the summit and south side; towards Marazion the base is of slate. One shapeless crag bears the name of the "Giant's chair," and a cavern is called the "Cave with the voice." From the Mount is often witnessed the "Calling

of the sea," a mist rising in the quarter from which the wind will shortly blow. Tremendous as sudden is the furious sea which bursts in unawares, rendering the passage from the mainland a continual peril to the passenger; the main is only accessible at low water.

"Who knows not Michael's mount and chair,

The pilgrim's holy vaunt;

Both land and island twice a day,

Both fort and port of haunt?"

The Mount took its name from an apparition of the archangel to some hermits; and Milton, in Lycidas, alludes to the legend :

"Or whether thou, to our moist vows denied,
Sleep'st by the fable of Bellerus old,

Where the great vision of the guarded Mount
Looks towards Namancos and Bayona's hold;

Look homeward, angel! now, and melt with ruth."

A grand prospect indeed the British Channel, the Irish Sea, the broad Atlantic, all meeting at this spot, while the Lizard Point and Land's End close in the bay. A Cistercian abbey, a Gilbertine nunnery, with a chapel of St. Mary, stood on the north-west. Edward the Confessor founded here a Benedictine priory, which Robert, Earl of Mortaigne, subjected as a cell to St. Michael's-of-the Peril-of-the-Sea in Normandy. In Richard the First's reign, a Devonshire knight, named Henry Pomeroy, having murdered a king's messenger, fled hither to his sister, expelled the monks, and fortified the hill: when pressed by the pursuers, on the return of Cœur de Lion, he had his veins opened, or as others say, mounted his horse and leaped into the sea. John, Earl of Oxford, in the disguise of a pilgrim, seized the place, and for some time held out against Henry VI. in 1471. Lady Catherine Gordon took sanctuary here, but was compelled to surrender to Lord Daubeny. On the rising of the Cornishmen, in the time of Edward VI., the chief families who had taken refuge at the Mount were made prisoners by the rebels, who advanced under shelter of trusses of hay. In July, 1676, the castle was struck by a huge meteor, a