“Twice,” said a friend who dwelt near this coast, “twice in the sixteen years that I have spent here has the sea been calm enough to reflect a passing sail.” This Atlantic has none of the tameness of the German Ocean, that plays on the low flat shores of Essex; none of the witchery of the green crystal that breaks over the white sands of Babbicombe and Torquay: it is emphatically “the cruel sea,” fierce, insatiate, hungering for human lives and stately vessels, that it may cast them up mumbled and mangled after having robbed them of life and treasure. It is a rainy coast. It is said in Devon, and the same is true here:— The west wind comes, and brings us rain; The east wind blows it back again; The south wind brings us rainy weather; The north wind, cold and rain together. When the sun in red doth set, The next day surely will be wet; But, if the sun should set in grey, The next will be a rainy day. When buds the ash before the oak, Then that year there’ll be a soak; But, should the oak precede the ash, Why then expect a rainy splash. The moist air from the ocean condenses over the land, and envelops it in fine fog or rain. But when the sky is clear, with only floating clouds drifting along it, the sunlight and shadows that fall over the landscape through the vaporous air are exquisite in their delicacy of colour; the sun-gleams soft as primrose, the shadows pure cobalt, tenderly laid on as the bloom on the cheek of a plum. As the tall cliffs on this wild coast lose themselves in mist, so does history, which attaches itself to many a spot along it, stand indistinct and weird in its veil of legend. Kings and saints of whom little authentic is known, whose very dates are uncertain, have given their names to castle and crag and church. Tintagel Rock is crowned with the ruins of the stronghold of Duke Gorlois, whose wife became the mother of the renowned Arthur, by Uther Pendragon. We have the tale in _Geoffry of Monmouth_. There, in the home of the shrieking sea-mews, Arthur uttered his first feeble cries. It is a scene well suited to be the cradle of the hero of British myth—a tremendous crag standing out of the sea, which has bored a tunnel through it, and races in and clashes in subterranean passages under the crumbling walls which sheltered Arthur. The crag is cut off from the mainland by a chasm once spanned by a drawbridge, but now widened by storm so as to threaten to convert Tintagel into an island. Near Boscastle rises Pentargon, “Arthur’s Head,” a noble black sheer precipice, forming one horn of a little bay into which a waterfall plunges from a green combe. But there are other names besides those of Arthur, Uther Pendragon, Morwenna, Juliot and Nectan, which are associated with this coast.