THE END OF ALL THE LAND 55 



us most in childhood when we learnt our geography ; 

 which fills the minds of imaginative people with 

 visions of barrenness and solitude and dreams of 

 some lonely promontory, the place where the last 

 man in England will be found waiting for death at 

 the end of the world. 



That is indeed the secret of the visitor's expectant 

 feeling and disappointment the vague vision of a 

 vastness and grandeur and desolateness almost preter- 

 natural, conceived in childhood, which all the ex- 

 perience of a long life of disillusionment has been 

 powerless to eradicate from the mind, or to replace 

 with a mental picture more in accord with the reality. 



But if this disillusionment is plainly visible to an 

 observer on the faces of many visitors, the books 

 about Cornwall tell a different story ; .their writers 

 would have us believe that the reality has surpassed 

 their expectations, that their emotions of admiration 

 and astonishment have been deeply moved. When I 

 had been some time in Cornwall and it had taken hold 

 of me, I sat myself down before a formidable array 

 of books descriptive of the duchy, only to find that 

 reading them was an exceedingly wearisome task. By 

 and by I discovered something to entertain and keep 

 me going ; this was the grand business of describing 

 the Land's End in a suitable manner, but more or less 

 rhetorically and charged with exalted feeling, which 

 was undertaken in turn by every visitor. This made 

 many a dull book amusing. I experienced a kind of 

 sporting interest in the literary traveller's progress 

 through the county, and looked eagerly forward to 



