78 COUNTRY ESSAYS. 



waves, expands and contracts itself, and flows out into long 

 streamers of shaking light and dancing shade, like a natural 

 kaleidoscope. Of course this effect can only be seen when the 

 sun is brilliant ; but once seen is never forgotten. On either 

 side the cliffs rise in grand precipices, furrowed and eaten out 

 into caves, where day and night in summer, 



" The blind wave feels around its long sea-hall 

 In silence," 



and the huge rollers of winter strike and boom, and flash out 

 again in showers of smoke-like foam. There is no more 

 characteristic coast along the whole margin of our island than 

 this. 



Ascending the next hill, we come to the grandest cliff of the 

 district Tol Pedn Penwith. It rises two hundred feet, a sheer, 

 almost unseamed wall of granite, soon, however, giving place to 

 the typical forms the rock generally assumes in this corner of 

 England. A capital example is to be found here the chain- 

 ladder. It is formed of huge cubical blocks, piled perpen- 

 dicularly one on another, as if some young giant son, may 

 be, of that friend of our childhood slain at St. Michael's Mount 

 by Jack the Giant-Killer, had amused himself in infantine 

 fashion building up a pebble-wall. In reality, weather and 

 natural decay have decomposed the softer veins of the mass 

 (where felspar perhaps predominated), and reduced it to this 

 remarkable semblance of stratification. The roof of a cavern 

 here has fallen in, whereby a singular hole called the 

 Funnel, is left for visitors who care for the services of a guide 

 and for show-sights. Another splendid sea-view is obtained 

 from the fields over this headland. On it are erected two 

 beacons to warn mariners of the Runnel-stone, a dangerous 

 rock a mile from the the shore, which has proved fatal to many 

 vessels. Visitors who do not care to walk the remaining four 

 or five miles round the coast to the Land's End, may here 



