"For there was no man knew from whence he came; But after tempest, when the long wave broke All down the thundering shores of Bude and Boss, There came a day as still as heaven, and then They found a naked child upon the sands Of wild Dundagil by the Cornish sea; And that was Arthur." The high, bleak, rugged and desolate tract of Bodwin Moor, at whose heart is Dozmare Pool, lies between the four towns of Liskeard, Bodwin, Launceston and Camelford. This last was our starting-point for Tintagel. We had reached Camelford by a day's journey from Penzance, setting out by train through a country seamed all over with abandoned surface diggings of the tin mines, pierced by shafts and defaced by heaps of mineral refuse to which heather was already bringing the first healing of nature. We had our nooning at Newquay and would have been glad to linger on its broad beach, looking up at the twin barrows where sleep, according to tradition, two kings of long ago,--kings who fought on that open headland a whole day through and fell together at sunset, each slain by the last thrust of the other. But we pressed on by carriage, hardly glancing at the long, low, stately towered church of St. Columb Minor, and cutting short our survey of the curious old panels, so richly carved with sacred emblems--pelicans, crosses, the instruments of the Passion, the pierced hand, a heart within a crown of thorns, the lamb, the wafer and the cup--in the brother church of St. Columb Major. From the depths of our Cornish road shut in by banks and hedges some ten or twelve feet high, we eyed the ripe blackberries hanging well above our reach; we saw a blazing rick on one side and, on the other, a maze of white butterflies circling among the fuchsia trees; we met a group of rustic mourners pushing a bier set on wheels; and just as the hedges began to open here and there, giving us vistas of wheatfield, moor, and sea, we found ourselves at Wadebridge, a little town with a street of ivy-greened houses dignified by a grey church-tower. We crossed a stone bridge of many arches that seemed too big for its river, and took train for Camelford. On our right we had the granite masses of Brown Willy and Rough Tor and presently, on our left, the great gashes of the Delalobe slate quarries. [Illustration: ARTHUR'S CASTLE, TINTAGEL]