Hagiology. All tradition declares that
millstones were the substitutes for cheap steamers.
Some fine morning, on the Cornish coast,
there lay a millstone; on it sat a saint—say
St. Blarney—giving each other a miraculously
good character. The millstone proved
the saintship, the saint proved the
buoyancy of the millstone. Heretics will say
that St. Blarney might have crossed the
Irish Channel sitting on a millstone, and Dr.
Newman be quietly allowed to believe the
fact, if we only be permitted to suppose a
sufficiency of plank beneath, and of canvas
above, the stony throne, which wafted Blarney
over, and his fortunes. Howbeit, whatever
the specific gravity of millstones in the
ninth century, as compared with the
nineteenth, down came gangs of holy men upon
the tin, copper, fish, and china-clay—anticipating,
no doubt, the Staffordshire market—
multitudinous as pilchards.

The morning of my descent from the mail,
and ascent up the Peninsula in various other
conveyances, was calm and dry; but a glance
to the right and left for a few miles showed
that the region was both a wet and a windy
one. Scurvy-grass (impressed on every boy's
memory by early perusal of Cook's Voyages)
was growing in the joints of stone fences, on
thatch, and the tops of walls, showing itself
in positions where it never appears in the
Eastern counties, owing to the greater
dryness of the climate. There, it is restricted
to marshes, bogs, and the margins of streams.
A lovely valley, whose sides were covered
with oaks, was completely tinted with a hue of
grey from the shaggy lichens which clothed
their branches. They, again, were hung about
with polypody and other ferns—an aerial
vegetation which could not exist there, unless
the atmosphere were a transparent sponge.
Were it hotter, there would cling the lovely
and fragrant epiphytal orchids.

People drove along the road in primitive-looking
carts—"built on Mount Ararat, after
the subsidence of the waters"—called
"Cupboards," to protect them from the windy,
showery climate. The women wore deep
curtains at the back of their bonnets, to keep
the hurricanes from sweeping down the backs
of their necks. Very many of the front doors
of the houses were enclosed in wooden
sentry-boxes; otherwise, tables, chairs, and sofas
might be whisked round and round the rooms
in a Cornish whirlwind. The great pains
taken to thatch haystacks were further
symptoms of a land of tornadoes. The thatch
was tightly bound down by a network of
"reed" ropes; at the end of each of which
ropes, mostly dangled a large stone, by way of
tassel. The top of the stack was thus
prevented from cruising in mid air, by a rude
and substantial necklace of geological specimens
of high interest to a race of miners.

Nay, even the natives fall victims to the
fury of the winds. It is on record, that, "at
West Looe, September 24th, 1758, the wife
of one John Gill, who is a farmer near us,
being upon the road from hence to
Tarpoint, upon a loaded horse, with fruit for
Plymouth-dock market; as she was travelling
upon the clifts by the sea-side, (for there
is no other road,) was overpowered by a
sudden gust of wind, and forced, together
with her horse, over the clift, to the loss of
both their lives, as they fell at least two
hundred feet."

But all this catches me no choughs. I
accordingly inquired about them. The answer
to me was a question to somebody else:—

"I say, Uncle Ned, you 're one of the
oldest men hereabouts. This gen'l'man seems
moody-hearted to birds. Are there any
Cornish daws hereabouts?"

"There was one came out of Mr.
Pendobus's garden, one plumy 'rainy' day a
month ago; but he soon got it back again. Of
the wild daws, I know no more than a duck
with the sprawls. He must go to Penzance,
or St. Paul's, or the Gurnard's Head, or St.
Ives, to hear more about them."

To Penzance I am borne, then, behind a
pair of flying coursers. At Penzance I find a
capital supply of fish brought by wonderful
fishwomen. I perceive also queer surnames
over the shop-doors; granite-built cottages,
with tall myrtles in front; pleasant people,
who can practise true hospitality; a poultry
society, as thriving as a crescent moon,—and
no choughs in the flesh, but one or two very
prettily stuffed.

"If you go to the Land's End, you will have
a chance of seeing some."

"But if there are none there, where am I
to go then ?"

"That you must make out when you get
there."

"On, on, on! This is Sennan; and there
fly two black-looking birds across the heath!"

"Nonsense! They won't do. One is a
rook, the other a hooded crow."

We pass the inn, a substantial and
comfortable-looking house, kept by Thomas Toman.
It hangs out a signboard; on the side of
which, facing you as you go to the sea, is
painted " The Last Inn in England,"—on
that facing you as you come from the sea,
"The First Inn in England." Extremes are
thus curiously divided, only by the thickness
of a signboard. But in reality it is only the
second and the penultimate place of
entertainment. With a true Celtic confusion of
ideas, the same Mr. Toman has, near the
brink of the cliff, a substantial cottage, which,
though merely an advanced post of his own
establishment, for the accommodation of visitors,
he now accurately styles "The Land's
End Hotel "—not superb; but "any port in
a storm "—thus falsifying his own vain boast
about the former First and Last.

Up starts a guide, before invisible, from the
bowels of the earth. Of course I shall go on,
and descend, and plant my foot upon the most
western point of Great Britain, choughs or