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which seemed to us continued up nearly to the brim of the cliff. How it then ended, and whether the highest part of this stone slide terminated in a passable way to the path above, we never knew.

Knowing nothing whatever of Alpine climbing, as I have said, we naturally started off inflated with great confidence in our ability for getting to the path above in ten minutes at most, and so saving perhaps quite twenty minutes which the walk back to the cove and along the path above would have meant.

Without difficulty we reached the ledge on which the balk of wreckage rested. Then helping one another, and passing up the hand-camera, we stood, or to be more correct leaned, there upon the top of the ridge of rocks. This little bit of climbing, we said to one another, was certainly not so easy as it had looked from the shore.

I then, camera in hand, started to try the next piece of the ascent over the loose stones which had seemed quite a practicable path from below. On the right was a sheer precipice to the cave's opening on the shore. A little stunted grass on a small ridge gave a slight assistance to the hands, and placing the camera in advance of each foot, I went up for several feet, not daring to look round, it was too steep. I then found I had either to fall over the precipice on the right and leave my broken body at the cave's mouth, or continue up the gully of loose stones. No grass at all grew amongst them, which was suspicious, if I had only known it. I could not place the camera anywhere, as the inclination was too steep to allow it a resting-place and some of the stones began moving. Then one foot loosened its hold, and I could not turn round to see where to replace it, pressed tight as I was against the side of the cliff. I clung on to some tufts of not too strongly planted grass, and at last found myself entirely supported by the muscular energies of my fingers on the edge of a stone. To have loosened their hold meant destruction. I sang out to my friend, just below to the right, and he with difficulty crept up the ridge perilously near the sheer precipice and held the wrist of the hand nearest him. That slight assistance saved the situation and enabled me to wriggle my body round, and then he guided my foot into a sounder bit among the stones,

and there I rested until breath came back into my body. We then had both to rest and take breath, for we were wellnigh exhausted. Reaching then for the camera, and recovering it with difficulty, we commenced to descend.

As we turned round we saw two gentlemen and a lady in the cove below evidently about to follow our example. One of the gentlemen had an Alpine stock in his hand and he soon reached the ledge over the cave's mouth where we reclined. We told him of our adventures and that we could not make the top. He said it was quite easy, thereby rising high in our estimation as a mighty Alpine climber. We therefore meekly pursued our downward path, humbler in spirit than when we had started the ascent. As we turned the corner to go out of the cove, to our astonishment we saw him descend; he too had evidently not found the way up so easy as it looked. Some of our humbleness, I am afraid, then evaporated.

The feeling of slipping over a precipice and the terrible helplessness that suddenly overwhelms one is not a pleasant sensation. Never again will I essay to surmount one of these innocent-looking Cornish cliffs. This attempt to save time had cost us an hour and a half of severe bodily labour, from which we suffered in limb-stiffness for days after.

As we slowly and with a chastened spirit trudged up the steep path over the cliff, we remarked to one another how true it is that often the longest way round is the shortest way home at any rate, in Cornwall.

A late Vicar of Mullyon kept a record of wrecks occurring at that spot on the Cornish coast. Between 1803 and 1874 no less than 132 persons were known to have been drowned, and 67 corpses were interred in Mullyon churchyard. Some 29 vessels were known to have been wrecked there during that period, and only one vessel that ever touched the shore got off again, and that was the John McIntyre, and she was of set purpose thrust in and floated again under very exceptionally favourable circumstances. On several occasions bodies in twos, threes, and even greater numbers, were washed ashore, evidently from recent wrecks of which no vestiges remained or were ever seen.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

THE LIZARD-LANDEWEDNACK

ELSTON is the key of the Lizard, that town being

to the Lizard what Penzance is to Land's End. The 10.30 a.m. train out of Paddington reaches Helston at 5.15 p.m. And an excellent lunch can be had on board. The motor omnibuses of the Great Western Railway convey travellers from the station at Helston in about an hour, so that the journey from Paddington to the Lizard is nowadays easy and comfortable.

The peninsula of the Lizard up to now can hardly be said to have attracted the attention which its obvious merits deserve. It seems to me to have been curiously neglected, and therefore I think it has a prosperous future before it.

A glance at the map of this part of Cornwall shows that the roughly triangular wedge of land called the Lizard runs out due south into the Atlantic, and consequently gets all the benefit of every sea-breeze that blows from south, west, and east. The breadth of the peninsula is not greatfour miles across at the lower portion, just before Lizard Town is reached, and only some twelve miles at its broadest, northern, part, so that the mild, warm, health-giving seaair is to all intents and purposes in active evidence all over its whole area. Its geographical position is therefore an asset which has not yet been taken into account and made known. It is a gold-mine which has not yet been worked.

The Great Western Railway did a wise thing when they took to running motor 'buses from the terminus, Helston, to Lizard Town, right through the peninsula from base to tip. Before then, to the mass of people, the Lizard was a terra incognita—a land whose exploration was a matter of diffi culty and effort. Even now there are many districts of

England easier to see. The railway needs extending to Lizard Town.

I have no doubt that as this little bit of almost isolated Cornish land becomes more known its popularity will increase, and as a favourite health resort its rapid development in prosperity will be very marked during the next few years.

The select few who regard the Lizard as their own special property will not like my saying this. They have for so long regarded the fine scenery of the Lizard coast as their own peculiar that they resent others finding out the charms of the place. They desire to keep the discovery to themselves, to make the Lizard snug and select. "Dear friends," I would say to them, " in these days of swift intercommunication and the marvellously swift spread of all kinds of knowledge you can't do it. It is no use trying." This attempt at secretiveness is true, for I have never heard visitors knowing the Lizard well telling others of its seductiveness. Praise is always, singularly enough, tempered off with disadvantages: the scenery always has its drawbacks; the antiquities of other parts of Cornwall are much more interesting. I would say to these estimable, even if selfish, egotists, Would you not, as patriots, rather have your own land known and appreciated, and money spent there, than see that money expended abroad and the fame of Switzerland, Germany, Italy, and Egypt extolled and advertised, to the detriment of your own most lovely home country? Think it over; give up the very natural, I own, selfish and conservative feeling which, after all, has no legitimate right to exist, as you do not own the Lizard-or any scenery, for the matter of that-and welcome the increased appreciation of the land you so love.

But the popularity of the Lizard will never be that of Land's End. At Land's End people go to see one thing; they see it the end of England-and return. There is no similarly concentrated show-place on the Lizard. The interest is nearly equally diffused throughout. There is no one thing you can come back to your friends and say you have seen on the Lizard, and thereby acquire increased éclat in their eyes and add to your small reputation as a traveller. There is nothing on the Lizard of world-wide

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reputation to hold their attention when you dilate upon your visit to this most southerly part of England as there is at Land's End. And there is another factor which will always prevent the beauty spots of the Lizard being overrun with tourists. Nearly all the interesting bits of coast scenery can only be reached by the pedestrian, and even the horseman must leave his horse behind him at the inn and explore on foot if he wants to make his visit to the Lizard as interesting and educational as it might be.

Cornish names are unlike the ordinary run of English appellations. The letter "z" plays a prominent part in many of them, as, for example, in Zennor, Marazion, Permizen, Perranzabuloe, Penzance, and in Lizard. This last, it may be well to state at once, has nothing whatever to do with the saurian division of the Reptilia, even though its exact significance and derivation be doubtful. In all prob ability the name is derived from an old Cornish word, lezou, which means simply a jutting-out headland, or else a gate.

The main characteristics of the Lizard may be succinctly summarised the peninsula is flat and treeless, raised some three hundred feet above sea-level, and is mainly remarkable for its lovely and much-varied fringe of rocky scenery, coves, cliffs, and caves, and also for its large area of serpentine rock—an igneous marble, like felspar porphyry, of extremely beautiful appearance when polished. In antiquities it is less rich than Land's End peninsula, but still it contains many objects of surpassing interest, as we shall see.

About half-way-the distance to the Lizard from Helston is eleven miles on the right, at the bottom of a declivity, the road passes a charmingly situated house, with delightful gardens and a lake. Here vegetation seems to run riot. Subtropical plants are seen, and the dracana, that weirdlooking, uncouth tree of the Canaries and Madeira, flourishes. This is Bochym, which means "the vale of weeping," but why so called I know not.

One mile from Curry Cross Lanes, on the main road towards the Lizard, are the Bonython Plantations and an old family seat. It was through Richard Bonython, an early American settler, that the poet Longfellow traced his ancestry through the third daughter of that Cornish gentle