the top of a hedge. In one place, he saw a mystery of the dark ages, performed in a ruined Roman amphitheatre. In another (Helston) he encountered the antique Pagan Floralia, under the corrupted name of "furry dance."* At a mine, he was treated as a mere Saxon younker, tucked under the arm of a huge miner, and called "my son." In short, after a long and charming excursion, he recorded its occurrences for the delight of his readers, and left Cornwall fully persuaded that it was at least a century behind the rest of the world; that stokers, and engineers, and buffers, were, and would long be, as much matter of faith, as much a myth, as piskiest are now to its peasantry; and that, for many a year, its pleasant vales were to be spared the desecration of the signal whistle. Surely," he thought, "rambles beyond railways shall still be a great fact! May distant Cornwall preserve inviolate her clotted cream, her junket, her heavy cake, her figgy pudding, and her savoury fish pie!

66

Alas, for the vanity of human wishes! Six months afterwards I too wandered in the track of Mr. Wilkie Collins, as did poor Inglis in the footsteps of Don Quixote; but false were all his fair prophecies! The hoarse roar of an engine was before me, and I was seated comfortably in a first class carriage of the railroad from Redruth, with a return ticket in my pocket. I timed the distance from Marazion-road to Penzance, as we flew by the shore of Mount's-bay. We did it in four minutes. St. Michael's Mount looked grandly upon us as we passed. Robert the Norman, son of the Conqueror, once rode along those sands, and his beleagured brother

* Flora-day, or, Flurry-day.

† Piskies, Pixies, Devon, i. e. fairies. A man who loses his way at night is said to be "piskie-led."

upon

There

peered down him from the battlements above. is a memory of the Druids about that "hore rock in the wood," as they then called it, before the sea had submerged the great plain that girded it in. King Charles the Martyr there held his latest court, amid the expiring pomp of royalty. Phoenicians, and Carthaginians, and Romans had, by turns, robbed and ruled around that stern old "Ictis:" and now we rushed past it with a careless glance, going thirty miles an hour, at the will and bidding of a grimy stoker, who was looking forward to an evening with his wife and six future stokers and stokeresses, and who did not care a groat for the associations and the beauties keeping their watch around. So far, therefore, there was an end of "rambles beyond railways." The steam giant had won the race. The romance of travel had retired farther westward. On the platform venerable gentlemen, unmistakeably of the Hebrew persuasion, were discussing the price of shares; polite officials, marked W.C.* on their collars, received and escorted you to the door; a railway omnibus bore you to a railway hotel; and when, on arriving, you took up the " Times," you found Cornwall no longer an unknown country, for you had its scrip quoted there.

There is something very disenchanting in this rude revulsion of place and scene. There is, as Lord Stowell called it," a laceration of feeling" that is hard to bear. The beautiful and the rare are not of such frequent occurrence that we can afford to lose them thus easily, or to part from them without a pang. Our fancy may linger around a dream, in which it revels and believes, even while our reason fails to be con

* West Cornwall.

vinced. So it was with the charm lent by distance to these far spots of earth, the old realms of Tristram and of King Mark. My imagination at least was no infidel; I trusted with a pious fondness in the accounts which I had heard and read, and which I had shadowed forth in my mind's eye, of these simple regions. It was very hard to find so many happy anticipations frustrated, to behold such an airy fabric of hope thus abruptly overthrown. The Atlantis I had come so far to see had sunk beneath the waves, and the common things of life took its place and rolled over its vanished beauties, as though it had never been.

While I was musing thus, a person by my side inquired from the waiter when the packet would sail for Scilly? The reply was to-morrow morning, should wind and weather permit." "Is it not then," said I, 66 a steamer?" "No," answered the waiter, "no, sir, it is a sailing boat, that goes with the mails, twice a week, from Penzance.” So there was actually, within the British dominions, a place, not only without a railway, but even without a steam packet. "Now," thought I," I can have a ramble beyond railways; I will go over to Scilly to-morrow morning."

A friend of mine, during his residence in France, once fell in with an Abbé who had never left his native district, surviving there, in his inoffensive obscurity, the Revolution, the Empire, and several phases of Monarchy, for so great and so wise a people as the French cannot be expected to remain content with one kind, preferring a government, like a theatre, des varietés. My friend rallied the old man on his want of curiosity, that had kept him at home, but the worthy priest had a reply to his hand. "Ah!" he said, vous voyagez beaucoup, vous autres Anglais, et pourquoi ?

66

Moi aussi, par exemple, je voyage, mais c'est dans ma bibliotheque. Je veux savoir quelque chose à cause de l'Angleterre, je prends Caesar, et qu'-y vois je? Londrespas London, c'est un vilain mot, mais-Londres, grande ville, située sur la Tamise, pays barbare, gens cannibales.' Et voilà tout, et c'est assez pour moi."

I am already, thought I, in a land where a man who builds a wall is called "a hedger," and into which " Punch" never penetrates; but I am now about to venture into a pays barbare, a still wilder spot, into a spot fabulous and unexplored, the dwellers in which lately petitioned for a communication with England once in six weeks, and to which the lady of the chaplain went in the full persuasion that she would have. to milk her own cow, and to perform all the usual little domestic offices entailed upon emigrants in the Australian bush, or amid the backwoods of Canada. There was a delightful vagueness and uncertainty in the future. A gentleman to whom I mentioned my intention advised me to take the coroner with me. I did not know but that a Phoenician bark might be moored to the pier, bearing “ its dyed garments from Bozrah," and ready to take us venturers on the deep to those tin islands, with which they still carried on a ghostly traffic. I went at last to sleep, dreaming that I was on the deck of a stately galley, before a fair carved altar of bronze, upon which I offered a sacrifice of frankincense to Astarte, and to the Tyrian Hercules, for a prosperous voyage.

CHAPTER II.

N the morning of Saturday, the twentyseventh of March, 1852, I stood upon the old Quay, Penzance.

In my place, a Roman would have abandoned the enterprise. The Iron Duke would have grumbled and gone on. An ill omen had decidedly encountered us at the outset.

The good yacht Ariadne was lying at her moorings outside the basin for want of water to enter; her boat was waiting for the appearance of Capt. Tregarthen, with Her Majesty's mails. And in that boat was the presage of evil, which an ancient traveller would have turned aside to avoid.

A young woman of respectable appearance was sitting on one of the benches, and sobbing convulsively. Poor thing! she had good reason for her sorrow. She had been sent for to Scilly to meet her husband, the mate of a merchant vessel, who had arrived from abroad in bad health. She had believed him to be still alive, but one of the crew had incautiously told her that he was dead.

It was a pitiful sight That long and tedious

to see her in her first agony of grief. day passed away with a foot of lead for us, but what must it have been to her?