Penzance is a harmony in grey and blue, looking seaward; in grey and green to the inward glance. Its chief street, Market-jew Street, climbing up to the centre of the town, has at its summit the somewhat gloomy granite building of the Market House--severely classic--fronted with a statue in white marble of Sir Humphry Davy, a native of Ludgvan village near by. Over a doorway of the building you may see, carved in the granite, the arms of Penzance, i.e., the Head of Saint John Baptist (I disclaim at once all responsibility for the apparent Irishry of the arms of the town being a head), with the legend “Pen Sans, 1614.” At the Alverton end of the town you may still see an old, heavily thatched cottage, where was born that doughty hero, Edward Pellew, who afterwards rose through his prowess to the title of Viscount Exmouth, a title more hardly earned than some parallel patents of nobility in this little day. [Illustration: SAINT MICHAEL’S MOUNT: ENTRANCE TO THE CASTLE.] ’Tis a languorous air, of Mount’s Bay; thus it fell that the morning was usually well advanced before we happened in the street or by the harbour. Here, on certain week-days, is great bustle, when the mail steamer is preparing to cast off for the voyage across to Scilly. The passengers, like the poet’s “little victims,” laugh and are merry, “all unconscious of their doom.” For, of a truth, ’tis a rolling sea, and, as the humorist might say, the sick (!) transit takes away the _gloria mundi_. [Illustration: PENZANCE HARBOUR: NIGHT.] But we leave these, and embark upon that little voyage of three miles to “the Mount,” as you come to abbreviate Saint Michael’s crags, across the shallow waters of the tumbling bay. In less than half an hour our little launch runs alongside the massive stone walls of the tiny haven, at the foot of the historic Mount, and we presently disport ourselves upon its delightful slopes, whose history, with that of the grey castle above, goes back to very dim antiquity: a history of sieges, surprises, and fierce fights among the rocks, and on the sands below. The Mount is now the property and the residence of Lord Saint Levan, the present head of the Saint Aubyns, whose name one constantly meets throughout Cornwall. The loyal Saint Aubyns have zealously recorded the Royal visit to the Mount in 1846, when her Majesty landed at the stairs of the haven; for there has been let into the rugged granite a brass-plate, inscribed with a “V.R.,” and fashioned to represent the Royal boot-sole, by which you gather that the Queen wore most uncommonly square-toed shoes in those days.