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TREVETHLAN:
A Cornish Story.
BY WILLIAM DAVY WATSON, ESQ.
BARRISTER-AT-LAW.
LONDON: SMITH, ELDER AND CO., 65, CORNHILL. 1848.
London: Printed by STEWART and MURRAY, Old Bailey.
TREVETHLAN.
Shakspeare.
Among the most striking features of the scenery of West Cornwall, are the fantastic piles of bare granite which rise occasionally from the summit of an upland, and to a distant spectator present the exact semblance of a castle, with towers, turrets, and outworks. So a stranger, standing on Cape Cornwall and looking towards the Land's End, might imagine he there beheld the fortress whose sanguinary sieges obtained for that promontory its ancient name of the Headland of Blood. Or again, reclining on the moorland, near the cromlech of Morvah, while the sun was sinking behind Carnyorth, he might fancy that at the red-edged battlements on the ridge, the original inhabitants of the country made their last stand against the invaders from the German Ocean.
Approach soon destroys the illusion. And it is superfluous to observe that the warriors of those times had no notion of the structures which these caprices of nature mimic--the castles of our Plantagenets and Tudors. Their real fortresses still exist to afford employment to the antiquary, and inspiration to the poet; and to one of them we now invite the reader to accompany us.
Around the folly, on the night which followed the departure of the orphans of Trevethlan from the home of their fathers, was pacing a stalwart man of weather-beaten aspect, with an impatient and irregular gait. The sun had sunk below the horizon, and all the south and west quarters of the sky were covered with heavy masses of cloud, from behind which, at intervals, came the low mutterings of distant thunder. Flashes of lightning followed one another in quick succession, becoming more and more brilliant as the shades of evening grew deeper. They broke from various quarters of the horizon, but particularly from the point of sunset. The light seemed to flit or be reflected all round the sky. Sometimes it was a lambent flame of blue, sometimes a flush of faint rose colour; sometimes the dark clouds were displayed in bold relief against a bright sheet of yellow or white. So far the sea was still calm, and the air close and heavy. But at length there came a motion in the hot atmosphere. The surface of the water was crisped. A sigh wailed along it, as if the spirit of the tempest mourned over his mission; and then the storm, whose advent had been foreseen by Randolph and Helen, during their last visit to Merlin's Cave, advanced rapidly up the sky.
And a tempest scarcely less fierce raged in the breast of Gabriel Denis, as he paced hurriedly within those old ramparts. He was expecting an assembly almost as tumultuous as that of the warriors whose battle shouts once resounded there, and he was resolved that it should not disperse in the same innocuous manner as former meetings of the same character. One by one, and two by two, as the darkness deepened, his promised adherents arrived, and the ancient camp became filled with an excited mob, anxious for mischief, ignorant what to do.
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