Some of the deep lanes bordered by those high stone walls peculiar to Cornwall, were left behind, and also many a pretty cottage, in the gardens of which, the fragrant myrtle, the gay fuchsia with its drooping petals, and the hydrangea, flourish all the year round; and now he was roused by the sound of the sea breaking at a distance round the promontory from which Penzance takes its name--the holy headland of the ancient Cornish men. From a slight eminence which he was traversing, he could see, but at a distance also, the lights of the town twinkling amid the moorland haze, and that at the harbour head, sending long rays of tremulous radiance far across Mount's Bay; then as the pathway dipped down into a furzy hollow, he lost sight of them. He was still within half a mile of the shore, but was traversing a bleak and uneven moorland, and on his right lay a scene of peculiar desolation, encumbered by masses of vast granite rock, here and there tipped by the cold green light of a pale crescent moon, that rose from the wild waste of the vast Atlantic. Suddenly something like a black hole yawned before him; a gasping, half-stifled cry escaped him; he stumbled and fell--_where_? Mechanically and involuntarily, acting more like a machine than a human being, he had in falling grasped something, he knew not what, and clutching at it madly, tenaciously, yea desperately, he clung thereto, swinging he knew not where or how, over space; but soon the conviction that forced itself upon him, was sufficient to make the hairs of his scalp bristle up, and a perspiration, cold as snow, to start from the pores of his skin. Old mines may seem somehow to have a certain connection with the story or destiny of Sybil Devereaux, if not of her brother Denzil, and the betrayer of both their interests, who now found himself swinging by the branch of a frail gorsebush, over the mouth of the ancient shaft of an abandoned one--a shaft, the depth of which he knew not, and dared not to contemplate! He only knew that in Cornwall they were usually the deepest in the known world. If few persons who are uninitiated, descend the shaft of an ordinary coal-pit, amid all the careful appliances of engineering, without a keen sense of vague danger, what must have been the emotions of the wretch who, with arms perpendicularly above his head, and legs outspread, wildly and vainly seeking to catch some footing, swung pendent over the black profundity that vanished away into the bowels of the earth below, perhaps, for all he knew, nearly a mile in depth! It was beneath him he knew; the quiet stars were above; no aid was near; there was no sound in the air, and none near him, save the dreadful beating of his heart, and a roaring, hissing sound in his ears.