They had evidently come in a cart, which took up its station beside our carriage, laden with bundles which looked uncommonly like bathing gowns; and were now seeking a convenient dressing-room—one of those rock-parlours, roofed with serpentine and floored with silver sand—which are the sole bathing establishments here.
All along the Cornish coast the bathing is delightful—when you can get it; but sometimes for miles and miles the cliffs rise in a huge impregnable wall, without a single break. Then perhaps there comes a sudden cleft in the rock, a green descent, possibly with a rivulet trickling through it, and leading to a sheltered cove or a sea-cave, accessible only at low water, but one of the most delicious little nooks that could be imagined. Kynance, we were told, with its "kitchen" and "drawing-room," was the most perfect specimen of the kind; but Kennack was sufficiently lovely. With all sorts of fun, shouting, and laughter, the girls disappeared to their evidently familiar haunts, to reappear as merry mermaids playing about in a crystalline sea.
A most tantalising sight to my two, who vowed never again to attempt a day's excursion without taking bathing dresses, towels, and the inevitable fish-line, to be tied round the waist,—with a mother holding the other end. For we had been warned against these long and strong Atlantic waves, the recoil of which takes you off your feet even in calm weather. As bathing must generally be done at low water, to ensure a sandy floor and a comfortable cave, it is easy enough to be swept out of one's depth; and the cleverest swimmer, if tossed about among these innumerable rocks circled round by eddies of boiling white water, would have small chance of returning with whole bones, or of returning at all.
Indeed, along this Cornish coast, life and death seem very near together. Every pleasure carries with it a certain amount of risk; the utmost caution is required both on land and sea, and I cannot advise either rash or nervous people to go travelling in Cornwall.
Bathing being impracticable, we consoled ourselves with ascending the sandy hillock, which bounded one side of the bay, and sat looking from it towards the coast-line eastwards.
POLTESCO.
What a strange peace there is in a solitary shore, an empty sea, for the one or two white dots of silent ships seemed rather to add to than diminish its loneliness—lonelier in sunshine, I think, than even in storm. The latter gives a sense of human life, of struggle and of pain; while the former is all repose, the bright but solemn repose of infinity or eternity.
But these thoughts were for older heads; the only idea of the young heads—uncommonly steady they must have been!—was of scrambling into the most inaccessible places, and getting as near to the sea as possible without actually tumbling into it. After a while the land attracted them in turn, and they came back with their hands full of flowers, some known, some unknown; great bunches of honeysuckle, curious sand-plants, and cliff-plants; also water-plants, which fringed a little rivulet that ran into the bay, while, growing everywhere abundantly, was the lovely grey-green cringo, or sea-holly.