“God! of whom musicAnd song and blood are pure,The day is never darkenedThat had thee here obscure.” Early in 1897 a landslip on the tall cliffs of Halzaphron–which face upon Mount’s Bay, Cornwall, and the Gulf Stream of the Atlantic–brought to light a curiosity. The slip occurred during the night of January 7th to 8th, […]

The Story is Told by Dom Bartholomew Perestrello, Governor of the Island of Porto Santo. It was on the fifteenth day of August, 1428, and about six o’clock in the morning, that while taking the air on the seaward side of my house at Porto Santo, as my custom was after breaking fast, I caught […]

A Story of 1644 I pray God to deal gently with my sister Margery Lantine; that the blood of her twin-brother Mark, though it cry out, may not prevail against her on the Day of Judgment. We three were all the children of Ephraim Lantine, a widower, who owned and farmed (as I do to-day) […]

A REPORTED TALE OF TWO FRIGATES AND TWO LUGGERS I dare say you’ve never heard tell of my wife’s grandfather, Captain John Tackabird–or Cap’n Jacka, as he was always called. He was a remarkable man altogether, and he died of a seizure in the Waterloo year; an earnest Methody all his days, and towards the […]

We were four in the patio. And the patio was magnificent, with a terrace of marble running round its four sides, and in the middle a fountain splashing in a marble basin. I will not swear to the marble; for I was a boy of ten at the time, and that is a long while […]

High and low, rich and poor, in Troy Town there are seventy-three maiden ladies. Under this term, of course, I include only those who may reasonably be supposed to have forsworn matrimony. And of the seventy-three, the two Misses Lefanu stand first, as well from their age and extraction (their father was an Admiral of […]

The jury re-entered the court after half an hour’s consultation. It all comes back to me as vividly as though I stood in the dock at this very moment. The dense fog that hung over the well of the court; the barristers’ wigs that bobbed up through it, and were drowned again in that seething […]

A mile beyond the fishing village, as you follow the road that climbs inland towards Tregarrick, the two tall hills to right and left of the coombe diverge to make room for a third, set like a wedge in the throat of the vale. Here the road branches into two, with a sign-post at the […]

It was not so much a day as a burning, fiery furnace. The roar of London’s traffic reverberated under a sky of coppery blue; the pavements threw out waves of heat, thickened with the reek of restaurants and perfumery shops; and dust became cinders, and the wearing of flesh a weariness. Streams of sweat ran […]

At Tregarrick Fair they cook a goose in twenty-two different ways; and as no one who comes to the fair would dream of eating any other food, you may fancy what a reek of cooking fills the narrow grey street soon after mid-day. As a boy, I was always given a holiday to go to […]

I.–THE AFFAIR OF BLEAKIRK-ON-SANDS. [ The events, which took place on November 23, 186-, are narrated by Reuben Cartwright, Esq., of Bleakirk Hall, Bleakirk-on-Sands, in the North Riding of Yorkshire.] A rough, unfrequented bridle-road rising and dipping towards the coast, with here and there a glimpse of sea beyond the sad-coloured moors: straight overhead, a […]

I.–A HAPPY VOYAGE. The cottage that I have inhabited these six years looks down on the one quiet creek in a harbour full of business. The vessels that enter beneath Battery Point move up past the grey walls and green quay-doors of the port to the jetties where their cargoes lie. All day long I […]

Judge between me and my guest, the stranger within my gates, the man whom in his extremity I clothed and fed. I remember well the time of his coming, for it happened at the end of five days and nights during which the year passed from strength to age; in the interval between the swallow’s […]

” Among these million Suns how shall the strayed Soul find her way back to earth? “ The man was an engine-driver, thick-set and heavy, with a short beard grizzled at the edge, and eyes perpetually screwed up, because his life had run for the most part in the teeth of the wind. The lashes, […]

Few rivers in England are without their “Lovers’ Leap”; but the tradition of this one is singular, I believe. It overhangs a dark pool, midway down a west country valley–a sheer escarpment of granite, its lip lying but a stone’s throw from the high-road, that here finds its descent broken by a stiff knoll, over […]

There are said to be many vipers on the Downs above the sea; but it was so pleasant to find a breeze up there allaying the fervid afternoon, that I risked the consequences and stretched myself at full length, tilting my straw hat well over my nose. Presently, above the tic-a-tic-tick of the grasshoppers, and […]

It is just six years ago that I first travelled the coast from Gorrans Haven to Zoze Point. Since then I have visited it in fair weather and foul; and in time, perhaps, shall rival the coastguardsmen, who can walk it blindfold. But to this day it remains in my recollection the coast I trod, […]

To a Lady who had asked for a Fairy Tale. You thought it natural, my dear lady, to lay this command on me at the dance last night. We had parted, two months ago, in London, and we met, unexpectedly and to music, in this corner of the land where (they say) the piskies still […]

One of these days I hope to write a treatise on the Mayors of Cornwall–dignitaries whose pleasant fame is now night, remembered only in some neat by-word or saying of the country people. Thus you may hear, now and again, of “the Mayor of Falmouth, who thanked God when the town gaol was enlarged,” “the […]

In the room of one of my friends hangs a mirror. It is an oblong sheet of glass, set in a frame of dark, highly varnished wood, carved in the worst taste of the Regency period, and relieved with faded gilt. Glancing at it from a distance, you would guess the thing a relic from […]