rying
ghosts, where there is a deeper significance in the "murmurs and
scents of the infinite sea."

[Illustration: CAVERN AT LAND'S END.

_Photo by Gibson, Penzance._]

But we must come to Land's End in the right mood--with sentiment and
inner vision, certainly, but without unrealisable expectations of a
mighty gigantic headland, an abrupt tremendous precipice. We shall
need the inner vision to contend with some jarring aspects of the
reality, which are naturally more aggressive if we come during the
holiday season. For the Land's End is a show-place, and we know what
that entails. There is a large modern hotel here, just as we find
similar edifices in some of the lovely solitudes of the Lizard and
confronting the very castle of Arthur at Tintagel. Being there, we
must take them philosophically--perhaps even make use of them. The
cottage once boasting in the name of the "First and Last House in
England" must now take a second place. There are some other aspects of
even more definite vulgarisation--the presence of the tripper with his
halfpenny newspaper, his bananas, and his mineral waters; there is
also too much building here, and the prospect of more. Mr. W. H.
Hudson makes an appeal for a national fund that shall buy Land's End
and sweep away much of this. He says: "The buildings which now deform
the place, the unneeded hotels, with stables, shanties, zinc bungalows
sprawling over the cliff, and the ugly big and little houses could be
cleared away, leaving only the ancient village of Sennen, the old
farmhouses, the coastguard and Trinity House stations, and the old
fishing hamlet under the cliff." It is a dream that should not be
impossible to realise. But the visitor who stays here after sundown,
when the throng has departed, can to some extent realise it for
himself. When the dusk of nightfall has veiled the defacements and
deformities, he can stay on this ultimate headland alone with the
immemorial rocks, the whispering wind, the brooding sea, greeted by
the lights of the Wolf and the Longships, with a far twinkle from the
Scillies. To the south the skies are searched by the great light of
the Lizard. This, indeed, is a vision of peaceful intensity, but there
are other times when there is no peace here--when winds buffet the
barren downs and waves crash furiously on the caverned crags, when the
sentinel rocks of the old country are a horror of wreck and death. Of
such a scene it would be more easy to say too