Of history Cornwall has little. The brightest jewel in her coronet is that she stood unfailingly for the Stuarts in the Civil Wars, and many a church holds a letter of thanks from King Charles I. Except for the struggles of that epoch, the Duchy has little to tell of what may be called historical times, but before them much. It is in the misty ages before the Norman Conquest that history was made in Cornwall, and every now and then we catch fleeting glimpses of scenes standing out bright and clear amid a general fog, just as we can to-day catch the vivid pictures of the landscape before the grey mists sweep down with incredible speed and blot them out. We see Athelstan's terrible fight with the Britons; his establishment of the collegiate church at St. Buryan in pursuance of his vow, when he returned victorious from the Scilly Isles. We get brilliant peeps in the legends of King Arthur; in the mysterious beehive huts and stone circles of a people who have vanished; in the whimsical tales of the early saints who scattered themselves so freely over the land on their arrival from Ireland; and we find hieroglyphic messages we cannot read in structures we call cromlechs and in the cliff-castles. Small wonder that Cornwall is a land of legend and story, and that tales of fabulous men and wonder-working men abound. In our very earliest nursery days, long before we could point to Cornwall on the map, we learned to repeat: "Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum, I smell the blood of a Cornishman. Let him be alive or let him be dead, I'll grind his bones to make me bread." And if modern nurseries substitute "Englishman" for "Cornishman," that is distinctly their loss. The coast with its mighty fragments and giant "chairs" and enormous blocks of stone is quite obviously the home of giants. II THE GATEWAY OF THE DUCHY The gateway to the Duchy is impressive--that is to say, the gateway by which far the largest proportion of visitors enter--the railway bridge of the Great Western at Saltash. This marvellous bridge of Brunel's has been often described; it does not impress by its beauty for it has none, but by its tremendous height and length. It is 2,240 feet from end to end, and rises 260 feet above the water. It cuts across the narrowest part of that great ganglion of waters which break up the land behind Plymouth Sound. On the north lie the broad inlets of the Rivers Tamar and Tavy, and to the south that of the St. Germans or Lynher River curves away, and all along it the line runs, crossing the broad inlets of mud at low tide and shining water at high tide, giving a glimpse of the famous Hamoaze at Devonport and the busy dockyards filled with the clang of driven rivets.