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NEAR TINTAGIL

Y first walk in Cornwall was at sunset, up and down the gray granite roads, sunk deep between high banks and shorn hedges; the cold wind whistling and rain falling from unseen clouds. Over the stone walls and hedgetops a moving wall of toppling cumulus, black illumined crimson from a hidden sunset; the sky above pale amber, blue, and wind-swept. Where a gate or fence breaks through the endless bank a view of green hilly pasture cut with endless dark hedge, and long distant hillsides, flat almost as the sea, which is hidden behind them—a bleak, monotonous country, dreary beyond words, and intolerable save for its keen air; houses next to none; this village consists of five or six granite, slate-covered cottages, flowerless. The roads for miles without a creature on them. The pastures empty. I was quite superstitiously frightened in this solitude by the sudden grunting

moors. Here a giant, they say, is pursued by the devil's hounds, whose bay is heard on stormy nights (and here it must surely be stormy always). A certain neighboring clergyman, who camped one night on Rough-tor, where there are ruined chapels and a rocking stone, said he was prevented sleeping by the strange noises on the moor, which, treeless and echoless should have been so silent. The legends here seem melancholy and regretful of the Past. When it soughs in these hedges, and among the scant trees in the little valleys, the country folk, it seems, say that Queen Jennifer weeps.

Tintagil! This tiny, remote village of granite and slate cottages, of modern boarding-houses on the bleak, grassy rocks above the harborless sea; how its fame has gone VOL. LIV.-68

Not a bush or flower or hedge in the

abroad in all the poetry of every country! Its name become familiar as that of Sparta or Troy, its little chieftains gathered with the demigods of Homer in the triumphant processions of Petrarch, and the viewless winds of Dante! The sea-to-day it was blue, tipped with white as with sea-gulls, but barely amounting to waves-breaks on the rocks and reefs, from Boscastle to Tintagil, leaving no stretch, not the tiniest, of sands, in the great cliffs, of which the ruined. castle, with walls of uncemented granite, seems a part. Squat among the short grass a little cruciform church overlooks the sea. Its imperishable material makes it seem built yesterday, young, new, like the sea and rocks, save in the rude stone shutters of the belfry and the cusps of the windows. Not a bush or flower or hedge in the church

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yard: only the sad-colored, pale grass, nibbled as much by the cold winds as by the scant sheep; and for hedges those odd walls of slates stuck edgeways in a sort of barbaric herringbone pattern which tell of Celtic art. The castle extends on to an almost separate, outlying rock, which the sea is cutting through, cutting away from the land, and where with a crane (no kind of harbor) they load slate on small boats when they can draw them in. By the castle side, on the strand where Merlin is said to have found the child Arthur, two quaint old women have a tea-house-a kitchen where I was glad to warm myself, and a parlor stuck about with Princess Mays and Prince of Wales, and, oddest, in connection with that poor drowned boy, Domenico Cataneo, who lies under the life-belt in the churchyard, Vesuvius in eruption by day and by night. This tea-house, and

clear sky and sea unable to brighten it with their steel-blue. It had been fine for several hours. But toward sunset, as we got the hill called Rough-Tor (where the devil's hounds are heard in full cry) within sight, great cumulus clouds came up and formed an unbroken pall over the dreary uplands.

the knickerbockered people rambling, teapot in hand, on the cliffs, do not diminish the sense of utter dreariness and desolation of this kingdom of Arthur-or was it of King Mark? A charm of humanity is lent the place by some very bad but very felt sketches (bought by the lady of the tea-house for a shilling) by a deceased old incumbent of the church, who, having been called Constable of the Castle in joke by the Prince's equerry, took it so seriously that none ever dared undeceive him, so that he would explain his duties, and how, had he gone to London, he must have gone to levies, cocked hat on head and sword on thigh-a clerical Don Quixote.

Returned home among deserted slate quarries, their mounds and shoots of rubbish grown over with rusty bracken and gorse. A rusty-iron colored country, the

I cannot imagine a

starry night in this country. Whatever it be by day, the clouds must gather and cover it at night, wiping it out of reality, separating it from less legendary lands.

ON THE MOORS

Yesterday we spent the afternoon on these Cornish moors. We passed by the village of St. Symphorian, which in this country is called a town: a little place of rough stone and slate, granite cattle troughs, a granite church and granite walls, treeless, on the top of a hill of rough, rusty gorse and yellow grass, windnipped even they: a queer almost Alpinefeeling little place, looking down on folds and folds of uninhabited hills and valleys, to where the shimmer of an estuary leads to a steely streak of sea. The moor where Rough-Tor rises (Rough-Tor of the HellHounds) is quite different from any moor I have ever seen; not lilac as in Scotland, nor pale green as in Northumberland, but tawny and black, like rusty iron, so that the brown cows on its dry bracken and gorse disappear in its color. These Cornish moors have something angry and sinister in that reddish, yellowish darkness of theirs, so that the blackish rocks, Rough-Tor and the other Tors, seem merely to concentrate, as it were, to be spokesmen of their threat. It seems in character that the sheep on these moors should run about coupled with chains.