nd hill-tops of southern
and inland Cornwall closing grandly the distant view.

All that we had hitherto seen on and around the spot where we now stood,
had not yet exhausted its objects of attraction for strangers.
Descending the rocks in a new direction, after taking a last look at the
noble prospect visible from their summit, we proceeded to a particular
spot near the base of the hill, where the granite was scattered in
remarkable abundance. Our purpose here was to examine some stones which
are well known to all the quarrymen in the district, as associated with
an extraordinary story and an extraordinary man.

During the earlier half of the last century, there lived in one of the
villages on the outskirts of the moor on which the Cheese-Wring stands,
a stonecutter named Daniel Gumb. This man was noted among his companions
for his taciturn eccentric character, and for his attachment to
mathematical studies. Such leisure time as he had at his command he
devoted to pondering over the problems of Euclid: he was always drawing
mysterious complications of angles, triangles, and parallelograms, on
pieces of slate, and on the blank leaves of such few books as he
possessed. But he made very slow progress in his studies. Poverty and
hard work increased with the increase of his family, and obliged him to
give up his mathematics altogether. He laboured early and laboured late;
he hacked and hewed at the hard material out of which he was doomed to
cut a livelihood, with unremitting diligence; but times went so ill with
him, that in despair of ever finding them better, he took a sudden
resolution of altering his manner of living, and retreating from the
difficulties that he could not overcome. He went to the hill on which
the Cheese-Wring stands, and looked about among the rocks until he
found some that had accidentally formed themselves into a sort of rude
cavern. He widened this recess; he propped up a great wide slab, to make
its roof: he cut out in a rock that rose above this, what he called his
bed-room--a mere longitudinal slit in the stone, the length and breadth
of his body, into which he could roll himself sideways when he wanted to
enter it. After he had completed this last piece of work, he scratched
the date of the year of his extraordinary labours (1735) on the rock;
and then removed his wife and family from their cottage, and lodged them
in the cavity he had made--never to return during his lifetime to the
dwellings