four towns of Liskeard, Bodwin, Launceton and Camelford. This last was our starting-point for Tintagel. We had reached Camelford by a day's journey from 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, but we pressed on by carriage, hardly glancing at the long, low, stately-covered church of St. Columb Minor. 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.

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 with special 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 humor with the poor old town, would not hear of it as the Arthurian Camelot, "a city of shadowy palaces

And stately,"

and disdained the tradition that the blameless king fell at Slaughter Bridge. My athletic comrade, however, to the admiration of a flock of little school-girls, 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 cliffhigh 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 come 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 Ingraine, 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 place is 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 Guenevere, for Arthur, when he revisits Tintagel, comes as the Cornish chough, its

"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 fashion strangely suggestive of

"casements opening on the foam

Of 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 realized what the fury of the sea-winds here must be as we strolled through the churchyard, whose slate slabs are buttressed with 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.

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, whose 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 harbor, 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