A VOYAGE OF DISCOVERY All day long the boat sailed about among the channels and over the shallow ledges of the Outer or Western Islands, whither no boat may reach save on such a day, so quiet and so calm. The visitor who comes by one boat and goes away by the next thinks he has seen this archipelago. As well stand inside a great cathedral for half an hour and then go away thinking you have seen it all. It takes many days to see these fragments of Lyonesse, and to get a time sense of the place. They sailed round the southern point of Samson, and they steered westward, leaving Great Minalto on the lee, towards Mincarlo, lying, like an old-fashioned sofa, high at the two ends and flat in the middle. They found a landing at the southern point, and clambered up the steep and rocky sides of the low hill. On this island there are four peaks with a down in the middle, all complete. It is like a doll's island. Everywhere in Scilly there are the same features: here a hill strewn with boulders; here a little down, with fern and gorse and heath; here a bay in which the water, on such days as it can be approached, peacefully laps a smooth white beach; here dark caves and holes in which the water always, even in the calmest day of summer, grumbles and groans, and, when the least sea rises, begins to roar and bellow--in time of storm it shrieks and howls. Those who sail round these rumbling water-dungeons begin to think of sea monsters. Hidden in those recesses the awful calamary lies watching, waiting, his tentacles forty feet long stretching out in the green water, floating innocently till they touch their prey, then seizing and haling it within sight of the baleful, gleaming eyes and within reach of the devouring mouth. In these holes, too, lie the great conger-eels--they fear nothing that swims except that calamary; and in these recesses walk about the huge crabs which devour the dead bodies of shipwrecked sailors. On the sunlit rocks one looks to see a mermaiden, with glittering scales, combing out her long fair tresses: perhaps one may unfortunately miss this beautiful sight, which is rare even in Scilly; but one cannot miss seeing the seals flopping in the water and swimming out to sea, with seeming intent to cross the broad ocean. And in windy weather porpoises blow in the shallow waters of the sounds. All round the rocks at low tide hangs the long sea-weed, undisturbed since the days when they manufactured kelp, like the rank growth of a tropical creeper: at high tide it stands up erect, rocking to and fro in the wash and sway of the water like the tree-tops of the forest in the breeze. Everywhere, except in the rare places where men come and go, the wild sea-birds make their nests; the shags stand on the ledges of the highest rocks in silent rows gazing upon the water below; the sea-gulls fly, shrieking in sea-gullic rapture--there is surely no life quite so joyous as a sea-gull's; the curlews call; the