ter interest in the famed Carclaze Mine, situated more than
600 feet above sea-level; the pit is about 150 feet deep, and nearly a
mile round. Once notable for its tin, this mine now supplies an
immense quantity of china-clay and stone. Charlestown may claim to be
the port of St. Austell, and is becoming also a popular residential
suburb. But St. Austell has another watering-place in Porthpean, a
mile or two westward, which, though it can boast of no shipping, has
features that may some day bring it a wide reputation. With good
sands, good bathing, a mild climate, Porthpean might easily develop
into a holiday resort of the conventional but highly prosperous type.
As yet its fame is hardly more than local.

South of Black Head, an eminence of about 150 feet, is the little port
of Pentewan, noted for its elvan building stone, which is shipped,
together with some china-clay, from its excellent small harbour.
Pentewan stone has a good name for hardness and durability; its
qualities are well shown in the tower of St. Austell Church. In the
tin works here, carried on at some depth below sea-level, were found
horns of the Irish elk, not petrified, but completely metallised by
the tin ore; also definite traces of buried forest. It is said also
that some curious oaken canoes were discovered in the soil, but were,
unfortunately, destroyed for firewood by the tinners. It is hard to
estimate how many valuable antiquities have been similarly destroyed
by carelessness and ignorance; but such ruin has been more often
suffered by stone monuments, longstones, kistvaens, snatched for use
as gate-posts and walls by heedless farmers and builders.

About two miles inland from Pentewan is Heligan, a very fine estate,
whose gardens display rare subtropical vegetation. Such vegetation is
rather a boasted feature in southern and western Cornwall, and is, of
course, interesting as a kind of _tour-de-force_, showing what the
British climate at its best can do. Apart from this use, however, it
may seem to some of us that such efforts are easily overdone; the
native beauty of an English garden or woodland has infinitely more
appeal, more freshness, more loveliness, than any grandeurs of the
exotic. The glories of Kew Gardens have their charm, their utility,
their educational value; but tropical growths are really as much out
of place in an English landscape as a Moorish palace or a Buddhist
temple would be. All who know anything of landscape garde