THE LIZARD LIGHTS BY NIGHT.
"Yes," said Curgenven, "in many places along this coast, when there's a wreck, and we're called out, the parson's generally at the head of us. Volunteers? Of course we're all volunteers, except the coast-guard, who are paid. But they're often glad enough of us and of our boats too. The life-boat isn't enough. They keep her here, the only place they can, but it's tough work running her down to the beach on a black winter's night, with a ship going to pieces before your eyes, as ships do here in no time. I've seen it myself—watched her strike, and in ten minutes there was not a bit of her left."
We could well imagine it. Even on this calm evening the waves kept dashing themselves against every rock with a roar and a swell and a circle of boiling foam. What must it be on a stormy winter night, or through the deathly quiet of a white mist, with nothing visible or audible except the roar of the waters and the shriek of the fog-horn!
"I think it's full time we were in-doors," suggested a practical and prudent little voice; "we can come again and see it in the daylight. Here's the road."
"That's the way you came, Miss," said Charles, "but I can take you a much shorter one on the top of the hedges"—or edges, we never quite knew which they were, though on the whole the letter h is tolerably well treated in Cornwall.
These "hedges" were startling to any one not Cornish-born. In the Lizard district the divisions of land are made not by fences, but by walls, built in a peculiar fashion, half stones, half earth, varying from six to ten feet high, and about two feet broad. On the top of this narrow giddy path, fringed on either side by deceitful grass, you are expected to walk!—in fact, are obliged to walk, for there is often no other road. There was none here.
I looked round in despair. Once upon a time I could have walked upon walls as well as anybody, but now—!