Exploration always brings its peculiar disillusionments; it had been better for a proper and enduring reverence of Carn Brea and its gory Druidic traditions to have gazed and speculated from below than to have resolved our speculations into facts so uncongenial. For, really, to view Carn Brea from the valley on a day of mingled storm and shine is to receive an impression of grandeur and Brocken-like weirdness. The Druidical cromlechs and stone altars of Borlase’s vivid imagination, the craggy tower, the modern Dunstanville pillar, break the sky-line into mysterious points and notches; even the white cottages, the brutal ugliness of the Dissenting chapel, and the merely commercial aspect of the tin and copper mines of Pool village, that straggle down into middle distance and foreground, take a decorative value and strange significance. [Illustration: DRUIDICAL ALTAR, CARN BREA.] The roadways that lead from Pool into Camborne are bordered on either side with immense heaps of crushed rock and dirt, the roads themselves grimy with coal-dust, where they are not stodgy with the overflowed red mud from the mine-adits. Pool itself is notable for nothing, except that its railway station, now named Carn Brea, was once a fruitful source of error in sending passengers and goods to Cornwall, instead of to the Poole in Dorsetshire. Hence the change of name. Rather more than a mile down the road is Camborne, and midway are the huge works of that very ancient tin and copper mine, Dolcoath, which on week-days make the country side resound with the blows of their steel stamps crushing up the ore-laden rock by the ton. Some of the galleries of Dolcoath mine are 2300 feet deep, and over five million pounds’ value of tin and copper ore have been brought to bank. I have been here on a week-day, when the stamps were at work, and the noise was simply terrific. I have never heard anything to equal it. Not only is it impossible to hear or be heard in speaking, but the mind seems almost to be stunned by the clamour. And to the stranger, the result of all this uproar is merely so many streams of leaden coloured water, flowing into what look like great mud reservoirs. But the grey and slate-coloured particles that go to the colouring of those streams are so many grains of tin ore, and the neat-looking girls who are stirring up the reservoirs with brooms are not engaged upon making mud-pies, but are busily washing the impurities from the metal grains.