One of the great features of the Land’s End is the famed Botallack Mine, which stretches out thousands of feet beyond the land, and under the sea. Wilkie Collins, in an excellent description of his visit to the old mine says:—“The sight was, in its way, as striking and extraordinary as the first view of the Cheese‐Wring itself. Here we beheld a scaffolding perched on a rock that rose out of the waves—there a steam‐pump was at work raising gallons of water from the mine every minute, on a mere ledge of land half down the steep cliff side. Chains, pipes, conduits, protruded in all directions from the precipice; rotten‐looking wooden platforms, running over deep chasms, supported great beams of timber and heavy coils of cable; crazy little boarded houses were built where gull’s nests might have been found in other places. There did not appear to be a foot of level space anywhere, for any part of the works of the mine to stand upon; and yet, there they were, fulfilling all the purposes for which they had been constructed, as safely and completely, on rocks in the sea, and down precipices in the land, as if they had been cautiously founded on the tracts of the smooth solid ground above!” [Illustration: THE BOTALLACK MINE, CORNWALL.] The Botallack is principally a copper and tin mine, and has in days gone by yielded largely. Mr. Collins descended it to some depth, and found the salt water percolating from the ocean above, through holes and crannies. In one place he noted a great wooden plug the thickness of a man’s leg driven into a cranny of the rock. It was placed there to prevent the sea from swamping the mine! Fancy placing a plug to literally keep out the Atlantic Ocean! “We are now,” says Mr. Collins in his narrative, “400 yards out _under the bottom of the sea_, and twenty fathoms, or 120 feet below the sea level. Coast trade vessels are sailing over our heads. Two hundred and forty feet beneath us men are at work, and there are galleries deeper yet, even below that.... After listening for a few moments, a distant, unearthly noise becomes faintly audible—a long, low, mysterious moaning, that never changes, that is felt on the ear as well as heard by it—a sound that might proceed from some incalculable distance—from some far invisible height—a sound unlike anything that is heard on the upper ground, in the free air of heaven, a sound so sublimely mournful and still, so ghostly and impressive when listened to in the subterranean recesses of the earth, that we continue instinctively to hold our peace, as if enchanted by it, and think not of communicating to each other the strange awe and astonishment which it has inspired in us both from the very first.