Rambles Beyond Railways

is the Ultima Thule where his progress stops - the shrine towards which his face has been set, from the first day when he started on his travels - the m

ea - the sort of place where the last man in England would be most likely to be found waiting for death, at the end of the world! It suggests even to the most prosaically constituted people, ideas of tremendous storms, of flakes of foam flying over the land before the wind, of billows in convulsion, of rocks shaken to their centre, o

by any local peculiarity whatever. If you desire really and truly to stand on the Land's End itself, you must ask your way to it, or you are in danger of mistaking any one of the numerous promontories on the right hand and the lef

to visit St. Michael's Mount, so well known to readers of all classes by innumerable pictures and drawings, and by descriptions scarcely less plentiful, that they will surely be relieved rather than disappointed, if these pages exhibit the distinguished negative mer

others stretching out around it on all sides. You are told by the guide to turn your back to the uppermost stone; to place your shoulders under one particular part of its lower edge, which is entirely disconnected, all round, with the supporting rock below; and in this position to push upwards slowly and steadily, then to leave off again for an instant, then to push once more, and so on, until after a few moments of exertion, you feel the whole immens

surface which rests on the flat granite slab beneath. But perfect as this balance appears at present, it has lost something, the merest hair's-breadth, of its original faultlessness of adjustment. The rock is not to be moved now, either so easily or to so great an extent, as it cou

im, than he conceived a mischievous ambition to falsify practically an assertion which the commonest common sense might have informed him had sprung from nothing but popular error and popular superstition. Accompanied by a body of picked men from his crew, he ascended to the Loggan Stone, or

ave fallen over a sheer precipice, and been lost in the sea. By another accident, equally fortunate, two labouring men at work in the neighbourhood, were led by curiosity secretly to follow the Lieutenant and his myrmidons up to the

ormation; ignorant people, who cared nothing about Druids, or natural formations, but who liked to climb up and rock the stone whenever they passed near it; tribes of guides who lived by showing it; innkeepers in the neighbourhood, to whom it had brought customers by hundreds; tourists of every

p him. Being by this time awakened to a proper sense of the mischief he had done, and to a tolerably strong conviction of the disagreeable position in which he was placed with the Admiralty, he addressed himself vigorously to the task of repairing his fault. Strong beams were planted about the Loggan Stone, chains w

he fact, that he defrayed, though a poor man, all the heavy expenses of replacing the

e Left." Thence, turning a little inland - passing over wild, pathless moors; occasionally catching distant glimpses of the sea, with the mist sometimes falling thick down to the very edges of the waves, sometimes parting mysteriously an

milestone marked "I," and will be informed that this is the real original first mile in England; as if all measurement of distances began strictly from the West! A little further on he will come to a house, on one wall of which he will see written in large letters, "This is the first Inn in England," and on the other: "This is the last Inn in England;" as if the recognised beginning, and

o borrow the painter's phrase), in the thin grass at the edge of a precipice. This mark commemorates the narrow escape from death of a military man who, for a wager, rode a horse down the cliff to the extreme verge of the Land's End; where the poor animal, seeing its danger, turned i

lding during the winter storms. Lastly, he is requested to inspect a quaint protuberance in a pile of granite at a little distance off, which bears a remote resemblance to a gigantic human face, adorned with a short beard; and which, he is informed, is considered quite a portrait (of all the people in the world to liken i

; downs, valleys, and crags, mingle together picturesquely and confusedly, until they are lost in the distance, on your left. On your right is a magnificent bay, bounded at either extremity by far-stretching promontories rising from a beach of the purest white sand, on which the yet whiter foam of the surf is ever seething, as w

ounds. There, Nature appears in her most triumphant glory and beauty - there, every mile as you proceed, offers some new prospect, or awakens some fresh impression. All objects that you meet with, great and sm

ne and an unbroken vastness of extent, nobly adapted to the purpose of protecting the shores of Cornwall, where they are most exposed to the fury of the Atlantic waves. In these wild districts, the sea rolls and roars in fiercer agitation, and the mists fall thicker, and at the same time fade and change faster, than elsewhere. Vessels pitching heavily in the waves, are seen to dawn, at one moment, in the clearing atmosphere - and then, at another, to fade again mysteriously, as it abruptly thickens, like phantom ships. Up on t

Sturdy little cottages, built of rough granite, and thickly thatched, stand near you, with gulls' and cormorants' eggs set in their loop-holed windows for ornament; great white sections of fish hang thickly together on their walls to dry, looking more like many legs of many dirty duck trousers, than anything else; pigsties are hard-by the cottages, either formed by the Cromlech stones of the Druids, or excavated like caves in the side of the hill. Down on the beach, where the rough old fishing-boats

midway at the entrance gates, still used, as in former times, by the bearers of a rustic funeral. Appearing thus amid the noblest scenery, as the simple altar of the prayers of a simple race, this is a church which speaks of religion in no formal or sectarian tone. Appealing to the heart of every traveller be his creed what it may, in loving

pt the home traveller; for these are the impressions produced, and th