A plan not wholly without charm. It was a heavenly day; to spend it in delicious idleness on that wide sweep of sunshiny sand would be a rest for the next day's fatigue. Besides, consolatory thought! there would be no temptation to put on miners' clothes, and go dangling in a basket down to the heart of the earth, as the Princess of Wales was reported to have done. The pursuit of knowledge may be delightful, but some of us owned to a secret preference for terra firma and the upper air. We resolved to face opprobrium, and declare boldly we had "no time" (needless to add no inclination) to go and see Botallack Mine. The Gurnard's Head cost us a pang to miss; but then we should catch a second view of the Land's End. Yes, we would go to Whitesand Bay.
It was a far shorter journey in sunshine than in rain, even though we made various divergencies for blackberries and other pleasures. Never had the sky looked bluer or the sea brighter, and much we wished that we could have wandered on in dreamy peace, day after day, or even gone through England, gipsy-fashion, in a house upon wheels, which always seemed to me the very ideal of travelling.
We reached Sennen only too soon. Pretty little Sennen, with its ancient church and its new school house, where the civil schoolmaster gave me some ink to write a post-card for those to whom even the post-mark "Sennen" would have a touching interest, and where the boys and girls, released for dinner, were running about. Board school pupils, no doubt, weighted with an amount of learning which would have been appalling to their grandfathers and grandmothers, the simple parishioners of the "fine young fellow" half a century ago. As we passed through the village with its pretty cottages and "Lodgings to Let," we could not help thinking what a delightful holiday resort this would be for a large small family, who could be turned out as we were when the carriage could no farther go, on the wide sweep of green common, gradually melting into silvery sand, so fine and soft that it was almost a pleasure to tumble down the slopes, and get up again, shaking yourself like a dog, without any sense of dirt or discomfort. What a paradise for children, who might burrow like rabbits and wriggle about like sand-eels, and never come to any harm!
Without thought of any danger, we began selecting our bathing-place, shallow enough, with long strips of wet shimmering sand to be crossed before reaching even the tiniest waves; when one of us, the cautious one, appealed to an old woman, the only human being in sight.
"Bathe?" she said. "Folks ne'er bathe here. 'Tain't safe."
"Why not? Quicksands?"
She nodded her head. Whether she understood us or not, or whether we quite understood her, I am not sure, and should be sorry to libel such a splendid bathing ground—apparently. But maternal wisdom interposed, and the girls yielded. When, half an hour afterwards, we saw a solitary figure moving on a distant ledge of rock, and a black dot, doubtless a human head, swimming or bobbing about in the sea beneath—maternal wisdom was reproached as arrant cowardice. But the sand was delicious, the sea-wind so fresh, and the sea so bright, that disappointment could not last. We made an encampment of our various impedimenta, stretched ourselves out, and began the search for shells, in which every arm's-length involved a mine of wealth and beauty.
Never except at one place, on the estuary of the Mersey, have I seen a beach made up of shells so lovely in colour and shape; very minute; some being no bigger than a grain of rice or a pin's head. The collecting of them was a fascination. We forgot all the historical interests that ought to have moved us, saw neither Athelstan, King Stephen, King John, nor Perkin Warbeck, each of whom is said to have landed here—what were they to a tiny shell, like that moralised over by Tennyson in "Maud"—"small, but a work divine"? I think infinite greatness sometimes touches one less than infinite littleness—the exceeding tenderness of Nature, or the Spirit which is behind Nature, who can fashion with equal perfectness a starry hemisphere and a glow-worm; an ocean and a little pink shell. The only imperfection in creation seems—oh, strange mystery!—to be man. Why?