Page:Cornwall (Mitton).djvu/113

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

68 CORNWALL the slippery weed-strewn rocks. It was a bold journey to make at the time, and their taste was in advance of most of their contemporaries who had not learnt to delight in the grand and desolate places of the earth. The Rev. C. A. Johns is well known as the author of Wild Flowers of the Field, which ran through numerous editions and is the most popular of his many natural-history books. Not many days after reading Mrs. Craik's book at the Lizard, I was in the light railway running to Newquay in the north of the county and saw a girl of about sixteen, deeply absorbed in a book, opposite to me. It was bound in the dingy maroon cloth so beloved by the librarians of Free Libraries, and peeping over I saw it was John Halifax, thus nearly sixty years after publication giving as much pleasure as when it was new ! If the good lady could have known it, how pleased she would have been ! When the sun falls over the shoulder of the cliff in the west, the revolving light from the light- house begins to flash out with a regular monotonous beat on its long night vigil. At any time after dark one can see the huge pencil of light darting round, striking the white signal station opposite,