le, that it seems part of a half-buried sphinx,
protrudes into the deep green water. On the other--less prominent, for
even at full tide the traveller can wind between its base and the
sea--there rises a shattered and ruined precipice, seamed with blood-red
ironstone, that retains on its surface the bright metallic gleam, and
amid whose piles of loose and fractured rock one may still detect
fragments of stalactite. The stalactite is all that remains of a
spacious cavern, which once hollowed the precipice, but which, more than
a hundred years before, had tumbled down during a thunder-storm, when
filled with a flock of sheep, and penned up the poor creatures for ever.
The space between these headlands forms an irregular crescent of great
height, covered with wood a-top, and amid whose lichened crags, and on
whose steep slopes, the hawthorn, and bramble, and wild rasp, and rock
strawberry, take root, with many a scraggy shrub and sweet wild flower
besides; while along its base lie huge blocks of green hornblend, on a
rude pavement of granitic gneiss, traversed at one point, for many
yards, by a broad vein of milk-white quartz. The quartz vein formed my
central point of attraction in this wild paradise. The white stone,
thickly traversed by threads of purple and red, is a beautiful though
unworkable rock; and I soon ascertained that it is flanked by a vein of
feldspar broader than itself, of a brick-red tint, and the red stone
flanked, in turn, by a drab-coloured vein of the same mineral, in which
there occur in great abundance masses of a homogeneous mica,--mica not
existing in lamina, but, if I may use the term, as a sort of micaceous
felt. It would almost seem as if some gigantic experimenter of the old
world had set himself to separate into their simple mineral components
the granitic rocks of the hill, and that the three parallel veins were
the results of his labour. Such, however, was not the sort of idea which
they at this time suggested to me. I had read in Sir Walter Raleigh's
voyage to Guiana, the poetic description of that upper country in which
the knight's exploration of the river Corale terminated, and where, amid
lovely prospects of rich valleys, and wooded hills, and winding waters,
almost every rock bore on its surface the yellow gleam of gold. True,
according to the voyager, the precious metal was itself absent. But Sir
Walter, on afterwards showing "some of the stones to a Spaniard of the
Caraccas, was told