THE END OF ALL THE LAND 59 



shining from a distance they made the gloomy world 

 appear vaster. Down in the south, twenty-five miles 

 away, the low clouds were lit up at short intervals by 

 wide white flashes as of sheet lightning from the 

 Lizard lights, the most powerful of all lights, the re- 

 flection of which may be seen at a distance of sixty or 

 seventy miles at sea. In front of the Land's End 

 promontory, within five miles of it, was the angry red 

 glare from the Longships tower, and further away to 

 the left the white revolving light of the Wolf light- 

 house. 



It was perhaps on some tempestuous winter night 

 at the Land's End that the fancy, told as a legend or 

 superstitious belief in J. H. Pearce's Cornish Drolls, 

 occurred to him or to some one, that the Wolf Rock 

 was the habitation of a great black dog, a terrible 

 supernatural beast that preys on the souls of the 

 dead. For the rock lies directly in the route of 

 those who die on the mainland and journey over the 

 sea to their ultimate abode, the Scilly Isles : and when 

 the wind blows hard against them and they are beaten 

 down like migrating birds and fly close to the sur- 

 face, he is able as they come over the rock to capture 

 and devour them. 



During these vigils, when I was in a sense the 

 " last man " in that most solitary place, its associations, 

 historical and mythical, exercised a strange power 

 over me. Here, because of its isolation, or remote- 

 ness, from Saxon England, because it is the very end 

 of the land, "the westeste point of the land of 

 Cornewalle," the ancient wild spirit of the people 



