h above you, adorned in
the loveliest manner by marine plants waving to and fro gently in the
wind. Rocky walls are at each side of you, variegated in dark red and
dark green colours--now advancing, now receding, now winding in and out,
now rising straight and lofty, until their termination is hid in a
pitch-dark obscurity which no man has ever ventured to fathom to its
end. Beneath, is the emerald-green sea, so still and clear that you can
behold the white sand far below, and can watch the fish gliding swiftly
and stealthily out and in: while, all around, thin drops of moisture are
dripping from above, like rain, into the deep quiet water below, with a
monotonous echoing sound which half oppresses and half soothes the ear,
at the same time.

On stormy days your course is different. Then, you wander along the
summits of the cliffs; and looking down, through the hedges of tamarisk
and myrtle that skirt the ends of the fields, see the rocks suddenly
broken away beneath you into an immense shelving amphitheatre, on the
floor of which the sea boils in fury, rushing through natural archways
and narrow rifts. Beyond them, at intervals as the waves fall, you catch
glimpses of the brilliant blue main ocean, and the outer reefs
stretching into it. Often, such wild views as these are relieved from
monotony by the prospect of smooth cornfields and pasture-lands, or by
pretty little fishing villages perched among the rocks--each with its
small group of boats drawn up on a slip of sandy beach, and its modest,
tiny gardens rising one above another, wherever the slope is gentle, and
the cliff beyond rises high to shelter them from the winter winds.

But the place at which the coast scenery of the Lizard district arrives
at its climax of grandeur is Kynance Cove. Here, such gigantic specimens
are to be seen of the most beautiful of all varieties of rock--the
"serpentine"--as are unrivalled in Cornwall; perhaps, unrivalled
anywhere. A walk of two miles along the westward cliffs from Lizard
Town, brought us to the top of a precipice of three hundred feet.
Looking forward from this, we saw the white sand of Kynance Cove
stretching out in a half circle into the sea.

What a scene was now presented to us! It was a perfect palace of rocks!
Some rose perpendicularly and separate from each other, in the shapes of
pyramids and steeples--some were overhanging at the top and pierced with
dark caverns at the bottom--some were stretched horizonta