It is not an end but a beginning that we have reached. These are the elements--pure earth and wind and sunlight--out of which beauty and joy arise, original and ancient, for ever young. Their presence restores us not to the Middle Ages, not to the days of Mr. Doughty’s heroic princes and princesses of Britain,[4] not to any dim archæologist’s world of reeking marsh and wood, of mammoth and brutish men, but to a region out of space and out of time in which life and thought and physical health are in harmony with sun and earth, fragrant as the flowers in the grass, blithe as the grasshopper, swift as the hares, divine; and out of it all arises a vision of the man who will embody this thought, a man whom human infelicity, discontented with the past, has placed in a golden age still farther back, for the sufficient reason that in every age he has been a dream, and our dreaming is of the dawn or the night, always disappointed but undaunted by the day that follows. And so no storied valley or hillside is richer in humanity than this coombe. It is one of the countless Edens where we are in contact not with the soldier and ploughman and mason that change the surface of the earth, but with prophet and poet who have ever lived to trace to Nature and to the early ages the health and vigour of men. There is the greatest antiquity of all, peace and purity and simplicity, and in the midst is the mother Earth, the young mother of the world, with a face like Ceres before she had lost Persephone in the underworld. In fact, so blessed is this solitary hall that after climbing out it is mournful to see the rabbit-worn tunnels and the Roman camp on the ridge. [4] _The Dawn in Britain_, by Charles M. Doughty. CORNWALL. In Cornwall, where the wrinkles and angles of the earth’s age are left to show, antiquity plays a giant’s part on every hand. What a curious effect have those ruins, all but invisible among the sands, the sea-blue scabious, the tamarisk and rush, though at night they seem not inaudible when the wild air is full of crying! Some that are not nearly as old are almost as magical. One there is that stands near a great water, cut off from a little town and from the world by a round green hill and touched by no road but only by a wandering path. At the foot of this hill, among yellow mounds of sand, under blue sky, the church is dark and alone. It is not very old--not five centuries--and is of plainest masonry: its blunt short spire of slate slabs that leans slightly to one side, with the smallest of perforated slate windows at the base, has a look of age and rusticity. In the churchyard is a rough grey cross of stone--a disc supported by a pillar. It is surrounded by the waving noiseless tamarisk. It looks northward over the sandhills at a blue bay, guarded on the west by tall grey cliffs which a white column surmounts.