once be moved. Six-and-twenty years since, it was overthrown by
artificial means; and was then lifted again into its former position.
This is the story of the affair, as it was related to me by a man who
was an eyewitness of the process of restoring the stone to its proper
place.

In the year 1824, a certain Lieutenant in the Royal Navy, then in
command of a cutter stationed off the southern coast of Cornwall, was
told of an ancient Cornish prophecy, that no human power should ever
succeed in overturning the Loggan Stone. No sooner was the prediction
communicated to him, than he conceived a mischievous ambition to falsify
practically an assertion which the commonest common sense might have
informed him had sprung from nothing but popular error and popular
superstition. Accompanied by a body of picked men from his crew, he
ascended to the Loggan Stone, ordered several levers to be placed under
it at one point, gave the word to "heave"--and the next moment had the
miserable satisfaction of seeing one of the most remarkable natural
curiosities in the world utterly destroyed, for aught he could foresee
to the contrary, under his own directions!

But Fortune befriended the Loggan Stone. One edge of it, as it rolled
over, became fixed by a lucky chance in a crevice in the rocks
immediately below the granite slab from which it had been started. Had
this not happened, it must have fallen over a sheer precipice, and been
lost in the sea. By another accident, equally fortunate, two labouring
men at work in the neighbourhood, were led by curiosity secretly to
follow the Lieutenant and his myrmidons up to the Stone. Having
witnessed, from a secure hiding-place, all that occurred, the two
workmen, with great propriety, immediately hurried off to inform the
lord of the manor of the wanton act of destruction which they had seen
perpetrated.

The news was soon communicated throughout the district, and thence,
throughout all Cornwall. The indignation of the whole county was
aroused. Antiquaries, who believed the Loggan Stone to have been
balanced by the Druids; philosophers who held that it was produced by
an eccentricity of natural formation; ignorant people, who cared nothing
about Druids, or natural formations, but who liked to climb up and rock
the stone whenever they passed near it; tribes of guides who lived by
showing it; innkeepers in the neighbourhood, to whom it had brought
customers by hundreds; tourists of every degree wh