There are people who go to Cornwall once for a holiday and return to it ever and again, when they get the chance, unable to find satisfaction anywhere else; the "atmosphere" of the country has entered into their blood. They think with an ache of the coast in all its cruelty and glory, they picture the bright blue of the rain-washed skies in a burst of sunshine, and they recall the great "hedges" with a foundation or core of stone, generations old, overlaid by an ample covering of turf and grass, a hot-bed for the stonecrop and hart's-tongue, fern, primrose, or foxglove. But what is a catalogue of words? It conveys nothing, any more than a catalogue of the names of books. Unless one can conjure up feelings, the attempt to explain the grip of the Duchy on recollection is useless. The clammy sea-wind on the face, the sense of great spaces, the grandeur of the coast, with its solemn, immovable rampart of cliff, and the pulsing life of the cold spray, for ever beating and frilling against the hard, glistening surface--these enter into consciousness. Of all things living, the swing of the seagull on motionless wings over a cavernous hollow brings one nearest to the realization of a dream. Others again go to visit the Duchy and come away disappointed because they have not found exactly what they wanted or expected. They take small children to coast places of which they have only heard by name, and are dismayed to find there is no sand, no beach, no bathing--only hills steep as the blue slate-roofs; and a good deal in the "people's" part of the town, which is narrow, slatternly and disagreeable. But it is one of the traits of Cornwall that she embraces such wide variety and shows such startling contrasts close up against each other. There are certainly a great many places where there are no sands at all, nothing but sheer wild cliffs falling perpendicularly to the sea, pierced by gigantic caves, to be explored at low tide only, and a small strip of shingle on which bathers are warned to enter at their peril, for the huge breakers from the Atlantic roll in continually, and one moment you are over head and shoulders in the smother of their foam, and the next stand naked to the winds, with a villainous undertow sucking away the pebbles from beneath your twitching soles. Carew, Cornwall's best-known historian, speaks of the Duchy's "long, naked sides." The writer on geology in the _Victoria County History_ says: "It has been calculated that a single roller of the Atlantic ground-swell (20 feet high) falls with a pressure of about a ton on every square foot." Places where such forces are felt are the Poles apart from the usual English seaside resort, sarcastically described by "Q" as "A line of sea in front, a row of hotels and lodging-houses behind, all as flat as a painted cloth, with a brass band to help the morality." Yet even in Cornwall if you want sandy beach you can have it. There are sands that