STAR CASTLE, AND THE ISLAND OF SAMSON.
From hence one best sees the island of Samson, two miles and a half distant, lying directly in front of the setting sun. Samson is an island of singular appearance, consisting of two hills joined by a low belt of land. Its name probably derives from that sainted sixth-century Bishop of Dôl, who has given his name to St. Sampson's (or Samson), Golant. There are some ruined houses on Samson, sole relics of the fifty people who once lived on it, and were deported to other islands by the autocratic Augustus Smith. And on Samson's northern hill are no fewer than eleven large sepulchral barrows. But if one wants to learn much about Samson and about the Isles of Scilly, glorified by romance, it is to the pleasant pages of Sir Walter Besant's novel, "Armorel of Lyonesse," one must go. There is no better book to read at Scilly. But Armorel's wonderful old home at Holy Hill is not in being, although photographs show the ruined walls of a house more or less identified with it. Besant no doubt took as his model the flower-farm at Holy Vale, in the centre of St. Mary's Island.
Gibson & Sons, Penzance.] ARMOREL'S HOME, SAMSON ISLAND.
Standing on the Garrison at night, the lights of many lighthouses and lightships are visible. There, on the almost exactly hemispherical outline of Round Island, is the lighthouse that shows a red flash; the Seven Stones lightship is out far beyond; St. Agnes light flashes on its island, south-east; and behind it, four and a half miles away, is the lonely Bishop lighthouse, completed in 1858, and said by some to be exposed to worse weather and more terrific seas than any lighthouse in the world. The lighthouse on St. Agnes is one of the oldest, if not actually the oldest, in the service. It was built in 1680.
The wrecks upon Scilly have been innumerable, and the crowded churchyard overlooking Old Town Bay bears witness to the great loss of life incurred, even in modern times. Here rest one hundred and twenty of the three hundred lost in the wreck of the German mail steamship Schiller, which was on her way from New York to Plymouth. She struck on the Retarrier reef, close by the Bishop lighthouse, in a fog on the night of May 8th, 1875, and almost immediately sank. Only forty-five of the three hundred and fifty-four persons on board were saved.
ST. AGNES.
The Scilly Islands are not less remarkable for rock-scenery than the mainland, and weirdly imitative piles of granite abound. There is a rock, or rather a heap of rocks, on Peninis Head, called the "Pulpit Rock," which at evening looks less like a pulpit than a naval gun; and elsewhere are the "Punch Bowl," on St. Mary's, the "Nag's Head," on St. Agnes, and many others. Not least among these is the Logan Rock, on Peninis Head, which weighs over three hundred tons, and "logs" in a most satisfactory manner, when once started. But it is a brace-breaking business, this starting of it, and you had better have a guide, for this particular rock is not easily to be distinguished from its fellows; and it is exhausting to attempt the moving of other, and immovable, rocks of three or four hundred tons, before you happen to hit upon the right one.