With the death of the second Earl of Godolphin in the middle of the eighteenth century, rank and fashion took leave of the parish of Breage, and the chief events in its annals became in the future mining speculations, with occasional wrecks and alarms of invasion. During the summer months, in the time of Sidney Godolphin, Godolphin House had been the constant rendezvous of the leading families of the County, and a great centre of social life. The great Minister whilst in residence at Godolphin had relays of messengers, who brought on his despatches from Exeter--as far as that town they seem to have been entrusted to the ordinary post; in those days, it may be added, no regular post linked Cornwall with London, Exeter being the extreme postal limit of the West. To Godolphin House, therefore, during the short residences of the Lord High Treasurer of England, came men in search of the crumbs of patronage that fell from the Minister's table, or to hear news of the outer world, or of what transpired at Court and who was likely to succeed on the Queen's demise, and how it fared with Marlborough in the great war, many no doubt of the varied throng having relatives serving under him. During the Napoleonic wars a Signalling Station was established on Tregoning Hill, and anxious watch kept over the seaward horizon for French Fleets which never hove in sight, whilst tradition says rumours of invasion from time to time stirred the public mind to fear. But the real events in the sequestered life of the district, beyond the mere fluctuations in the prosperity of the tin trade, which stirred the pulses of public interest were the harvest of shipwrecks which the winter storms yielded each year to the inhabitants. The merits and values of the cargoes of the different wrecks were never-failing topics of interest round the firesides, memories of which still linger in the minds of the aged. The invention of steam told sadly against the value of this annual winter harvest: now it is steam and steam trawlers that ruin the local fishing industry, then it was steam striking a death blow at the local industry of wrecking. Old men have told the writer a legend, told to them by men of a still older generation, of one of the first steamers to appear on the coast. The inhabitants concluded with regard to it that it was a ship on fire, and consequently followed it in ever increasing numbers along the coast, anxious to participate in the good things in the hold of the ship when her crew beaten by the flames drove her on shore. The establishment of the Wolf Lighthouse within comparatively recent years, the fitful gleam of whose red eye is clearly visible from our shores far out to sea, has practically brought to an end the dismal tale of wrecks and drowned sailors that each year produced. Until well on into the last century it was the custom to bury drowned sailors in trenches along the shore; the place where a number of