St.
Michael's Mount, so well known to readers of all classes by innumerable
pictures and drawings, and by descriptions scarcely less plentiful, that
they will surely be relieved rather than disappointed, if these pages
exhibit the distinguished negative merit of passing the Mount without
notice. From Marazion we walked to Penzance, from Penzance to the
beautiful coast scenery at Lamorna Cove, and thence to Trereen,
celebrated as the halting place for a visit to one of Cornwall's
greatest curiosities--the Loggan Stone.

This far-famed rock rises on the top of a bold promontory of granite,
jutting far out into the sea, split into the wildest forms, and towering
precipitously to a height of a hundred feet. When you reach the Loggan
Stone, after some little climbing up perilous-looking places, you see a
solid, irregular mass of granite, which is computed to weigh eighty
five tons, supported by its centre only, on a flat, broad rock, which,
in its turn, rests on several others stretching out around it on all
sides. You are told by the guide to turn your back to the uppermost
stone; to place your shoulders under one particular part of its lower
edge, which is entirely disconnected, all round, with the supporting
rock below; and in this position to push upwards slowly and steadily,
then to leave off again for an instant, then to push once more, and so
on, until after a few moments of exertion, you feel the whole immense
mass above you moving as you press against it. You redouble your
efforts--then turn round--and see the massy Loggan Stone, set in motion
by nothing but your own pair of shoulders, slowly rocking backwards and
forwards with an alternate ascension and declension, at the outer edges,
of at least three inches. You have treated eighty-five tons of granite
like a child's cradle; and, like a child's cradle, those eighty-five
tons have rocked at your will!

The pivot on which the Loggan Stone is thus easily moved, is a small
protrusion in its base, on all sides of which the whole surrounding
weight of rock is, by an accident of Nature, so exactly equalized, as
to keep it poised in the nicest balance on the one little point in its
lower surface which rests on the flat granite slab beneath. But perfect
as this balance appears at present, it has lost something, the merest
hair's-breadth, of its original faultlessness of adjustment. The rock is
not to be moved now, either so easily or to so great an extent, as it
could