An elderly gentleman, who had hobbled up the path on gouty feet, sat down beside me. Like two true Britons, we sat there a minute or two together, each ignoring the presence of the other. He glanced a greatly impressed eye upon the short, steep and slippery slope of grass that alone intervened between his side of the seat and a sheer drop of some two hundred feet into the sea. “It would not be difficult to commit suicide here,” he at length remarked. Was he wearied to extinction with his gout, and so determined here and now, to make an end? Not at all: it was a purely speculative thought. “The easiest thing in the world,” I replied; “and one person might readily push another over, and no one----” “Yes, yes,” he rejoined with alacrity, and relapsed into thoughtful silence a moment. Then, suddenly consulting his watch: “Time I was moving off for lunch.” Now I don’t by any means, you know, regard myself as a very desperate-looking person, yet obviously that unlucky remark moved that nervous old gentleman to go off in quest of his lunch at a very early hour. I suppose he imagined himself to have experienced a very narrow escape. “One _does_ read such dreadful things in the papers,” I hear him, in imagination, saying at lunch; “you never know what lunatic you may meet in some lonely spot.” True. [Illustration: THE VALLEY OF ROCKS.] And so, into the Valley of Rocks. There was a time when every writer who happened upon the Valley of Rocks felt himself obliged to adopt an attitude of awe, and to ransack the dictionary for adjectives to fitly represent the complicated state of mind into which he generally lashed himself. That time has naturally been succeeded by a revulsion of feeling; and there is not a guidebook at the present day which does not apologise for those old transports of feeling, and declare the Valley of Rocks to be really nothing remarkable. But that later attitude is just as absurd as the earlier. The valley is very fine indeed, and its wildness is only impaired by the broad white ribbon of road that runs through it, and will not let you forget that here, too, however craggy and precipitous the piled-up masses of granite on either side, and however remote the feeling, actually the most up-to-date civilisation is very near indeed. This is what was written of the Valley of Rocks in 1803: “The heights on each side are of a mountainous magnitude, but composed, to all appearances, of loose, unequal masses, which form here and there rude natural columns, and are fantastically arranged along the summits, so as to resemble extensive ruins impending over the pass.”