Not many days after reading Mrs. Craik's book at the Lizard, I was in the light railway running to Newquay in the north of the county and saw a girl of about sixteen, deeply absorbed in a book, opposite to me. It was bound in the dingy maroon cloth so beloved by the librarians of Free Libraries, and peeping over I saw it was John Halifax, thus nearly sixty years after publication giving as much pleasure as when it was new! If the good lady could have known it, how pleased she would have been!
When the sun falls over the shoulder of the cliff in the west, the revolving light from the lighthouse begins to flash out with a regular monotonous beat on its long night vigil. At any time after dark one can see the huge pencil of light darting round, striking the white signal station opposite, losing itself in the sea and so returning. There is something awe-inspiring in that regular sweep of pulsing light every three minutes, hour after hour, carrying its silent sure message to those at sea. If anything happened to the Lizard light what terrible wrecks there would be on this jagged coast!
Nearly as impressive is it to catch by night the glimmer of the Morse code flashing from ships which are revealing their names and journeys to those ever-vigilant watchers in the signal station as they pass. What stories that signal station might tell of the journeyings to and fro, of the ships conveying food and clothes and necessaries from port to port! Here is a vessel bound from Galveston to Havre with cotton, she is British; about every second or third that come by is laden with coals from Cardiff; here is another from the other direction, bringing fruit from the Mediterranean to Liverpool, with all the beating up the Irish Channel yet to face; passing it, and doubtless hailing it in transit, is another Liverpool ship carrying a general cargo to Italy, and when times are peaceful and there are no scares from submarines, the great American liners from Plymouth swell the number with their enormous bulk. It is a regular, and, if one may use the expression, a well-beaten track around this great blunt headland, and it is small wonder the enemy submarines haunted it to find their prey, as men wait hidden beside the tracks of wild animals in the jungle.
V
KING ARTHUR'S LAND
Tintagel can never disappoint anyone. The very spirit of romance is in the place. If you have climbed across the narrow neck that links the "island" to the main, and passing through the low doorway of the ruined castle, have crossed the space surrounded by the broken wall, and so gone out again to the plateau above, you will find yourself among the sheep and cut off from the world, apparently swinging in space. There are great mounds all around, in shape like graves, covered with coarse tufty grass munched by the ragged sheep whose hair is blown into knots by the ceaseless wind. It takes very little imagination to picture that around lie the bodies of a mighty host of warriors, at peace at last in sound of the booming sea which clashes in its mad rush through the caverns deep beneath, with the wind whistling over them boisterously, or crooning low even on the mildest summer day.
It is quite likely, as experts say, that the present ruins date only from the twelfth or thirteenth century. Arthur may never have set foot on the tufty grass of the cube-shaped island; there may never, for that matter, have been an Arthur at all, but lying in the grass above the slaty ruins and looking through the serrated arch to the onyx-green sea, fretting the black rock, all these doubts seem simply silly and fly away light as the spume flying inland in great balls.