BY The Author of "John Halifax, Gentleman" WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY C. NAPIER HEMY London MACMILLAN AND CO. 1884 The Right of Translation and Reproduction is Reserved LONDON: R. Clay, Sons, and Taylor , BREAD STREET HILL, E.C....

I believe in holidays. Not in a frantic rushing about from place to place, glancing at everything and observing nothing; flying from town to town, from hotel to hotel, eager to "do" and to see a country, in order that when they get home they may say they have done it, and seen it. Only to say;—as for any real vision of eye, heart, and brain, they might as well go through the world blindfold. It is not the things we see, but the mind we see them with, which makes the real interest of travelling.

Is there anything more delightful than to start on a smiling morning in a comfortable carriage, with all one's impedimenta (happily not much!) safely stowed away under one's eyes, with a good horse, over which one's feelings of humanity need not be always agonising, and a man to drive, whom one can trust to have as much sense as the brute, especially in the matter of "refreshment." Our letters that morning had brought us a comico-tragic story of a family we knew, who, migrating with a lot of chi

"And a beautiful day it is, ladies, though it won't do for Kynance." Only 8 a.m., yet there stood the faithful Charles, hat in hand, having heard that his ladies were at breakfast, and being evidently anxious that they should not lose an hour of him and his carriage, which were both due at Falmouth to-night. For this day was Saturday, and we were sending him home for Sunday. "As I found out last night, the tide won't suit for Kynance till Wednesday or Thursday, and you'll be too tired to walk mu

Sunday , September 4th—and we had started on September 1st; was it possible we had only been travelling four days? It felt like fourteen at least. We had seen so much, taken in so many new interests—nay, made several new friends. Already we began to plan another meeting with John Curgenven, who we found was a relation of our landlady, or of our bright-faced serving maiden, Esther—I forget which. But everybody seemed connected with everybody at the Lizard, and everybody took a friendly interest i

"Hope for the best, and be prepared for the worst," had been the motto of our journey. So when we rose to one of the wettest mornings that ever came out of the sky, there was a certain satisfaction in being prepared for it. "We must have a fire, that is certain," was our first decision. This entailed the abolition of our beautiful decorations—our sea-holly and ferns; also some anxious looks from our handmaiden. Apparently no fire, had been lit in this rather despised room for many months—years p

And a day absolutely divine! Not a cloud upon the sky, not a ripple upon the water, or it appeared so in the distance. Nearer, no doubt, there would have been that heavy ground-swell which is so long in subsiding, in fact is scarcely ever absent on this coast. The land, like the sea, was all one smile; the pasture fields shone in brilliant green, the cornfields gleaming yellow—at once a beauty and a thanksgiving. It was the very perfection of an autumn morning. We would not lose an hour of it, b

John Curgenven had said last night, with his air of tender patronising, half regal, half paternal, which we declared always reminded us of King Arthur—"Ladies, whenever you settle to go to Kynance, I'll take you." And sure enough there he stood, at eight in the morning, quite a picture, his cap in one hand, a couple of fishes dangling from the other—he had brought them as a present, and absolutely refused to be paid—smiling upon us at our breakfast, as benignly as did the sun. He came to say tha

And seven days were all we could allow ourselves at the Lizard, if we meant to see the rest of Cornwall. We began to reckon with sore hearts that five days were already gone, and it seemed as if we had not seen half we ought to see, even of our near surroundings. "We will take no excursion to-day. We will just have our bath at Housel Cove and then we will wander about the shore, and examine the Lizard Lights. Only fancy, our going away to-morrow without having seen the inside of the Lizard Light

And our last at the Lizard, which a week ago had been to us a mere word or dot in a map; now we carried away from it a living human interest in everything and everybody. Esther bade us a cordial farewell: Mrs. Curgenven, standing at the door of her serpentine shop, repeated the good wishes, and informed us that John and his boat had already started for Church Cove. As we drove through the bright little Lizard Town, and past the Church of Landewednack, wondering if we should ever see either again

I cannot advise Marazion as a bathing place. What a down-come from the picturesque vision of last night, to a small ugly fishy-smelling beach, which seemed to form a part of the town and its business, and was overlooked from everywhere! Yet on it two or three family groups were evidently preparing for a dip, or rather a wade of about a quarter of a mile in exceedingly dirty sea water. "This will never do," we said to our old Norwegian. "You must row us to some quiet cove along the shore, and awa

The last thing before retiring, we had glanced out on a gloomy sea, a starless sky, pitch darkness, broken only by those moving lights on St. Michael's Mount, and thought anxiously of the morrow. It would be hard, if after journeying thus far and looking forward to it so many years, the day on which we went to the Land's End should turn out a wet day! Still "hope on, hope ever," as we used to write in our copy-books. Some of us, I think, still go on writing it in empty air, and will do so till t

Monday morning. Black Monday we were half inclined to call it, knowing that by the week's end our travels must be over and done, and that if we wished still to see all we had planned, we must inevitably next morning return to civilisation and railways, a determination which involved taking this night "a long, a last farewell" of our comfortable carriage and our faithful Charles. "But it needn't be until night," said he, evidently loth to part from his ladies. "If I get back to Falmouth by daylig

Into King Arthurs land—Tintagel his birth-place, and Camelford, where he fought his last battle—the legendary region of which one may believe as much or as little as one pleases—we were going to-day. With the good common sense which we flattered ourselves had accompanied every step of our unsentimental journey, we had arranged all before-hand, ordered a carriage to meet the mail train, and hoped to find at Tintagel—not King Uther Pendragon, King Arthur or King Mark, but a highly respectable land

And all Arthurian days, so I will condense them into one chapter, and not spin out the hours that were flying so fast. Yet we hardly wished to stop them; for pleasant as travelling is, the best delight of all is—the coming home. Walking, to one more of those exquisite autumn days, warm as summer, yet with a tender brightness that hot summer never has, like the love between two old people, out of whom all passion has died—we remembered that we were at Tintagel, the home of Ygrayne and Arthur, of

Written more than a year after. The "old hen" and her chickens have long been safe at home. A dense December fog creeps in everywhere, choking and blinding, as I finish the history of those fifteen innocent days, calm as autumn, and bright as spring, when we three took our Unsentimental Journey together through Cornwall. Many a clever critic, like Sir Charles Coldstream when he looked into the crater of Vesuvius, may see "nothing in it"—a few kindly readers looking a little further, may see a li