woman Joanna,
who lived near, who was a rigid vegetarian, and quarrelled with the
saint for catching his fish on Sunday. He said that to fish was no
worse than to do gardening. We may repeat these old stories, but the
Cornish folk of to-day know nothing of them; they are dead, except as
matter for the guide-books. St. Levan Church is snugly sheltered. It
has been carefully restored and is very attractive, with a good tower,
some fine bench-ends, and a beautiful screen. Outside the church is a
cleft boulder of granite, and there used to be a local saying that
when a pack-horse should ride through St. Levan's stone the world
would come to an end. A little beyond is the really delightful
Porthgwarra, with its rugged stone slip and tunnels leading to the
little fishing-cove. Visitors are beginning to discover Porthgwarra,
and it is one of those quiet, lonely haunts where lodgings must be
booked long in advance. Cornwall has a good many such--the resort of
those who shun the ordinary watering-place.

CHAPTER X

THE SCILLY ISLANDS

Geologically, we are still on the mainland when we reach the isles of
Scilly; they belong to the axis of the Cornish peninsula, and are in
what may still be called, comparatively, the narrow seas. The
hundred-fathom line lies far beyond them; these waters, though
thoroughly oceanic in character, are not oceanic in depth. We may
regard the islands as the last upward thrust of the granitic backbone
that runs, at a diminishing gradient, from Dartmoor to Land's End,
while the submarine plateau follows a similar gradient. Structurally,
therefore, these isles are a continuation of Land's End, but the
granite has become less consistent and more friable; it is largely
broken into felspar, quartz, and mica, with schorl, chlorite, and
hornblende. No great elevation is attained--nothing above 160 feet;
the grandeur of the coasts, which certainly does not equal that of
North Cornwall, consists in their rugged wildness and the fantastic
weathering of their crags. Contorted formations, logans and
rock-basins, reveal the decomposition of softer measures that has been
proceeding for ages. The isles lie about 27 miles west of Land's End,
but the journey from Penzance to St. Mary's is about 40 miles, and
the small steamers that make the passage usually take about four
hours. More often than not this passage is an uncomfortable one; the
islands stand in the ocean gateway of the two Channels, and they catc