prudent friends. At sea or on shore, how sweet is triumph, even in the
smallest things!

Bating the one fact of the wind having blown from an unfavourable
quarter, unvarying good fortune had, thus far, accompanied our cruise,
and our luck did not desert us when we got on shore at St. Mary's. We
went, happily for our own comfort, to the hotel kept by the master of
the packet plying between Hugh Town and Penzance. By our landlord and
his cordial wife and family we were received with such kindness and
treated with such care, that we felt really and truly at home before we
had been half an hour in the house. And, by way of farther familiarizing
us with Scilly at first sight, who should the resident medical man turn
out to be but a gentleman whom I knew. These were certainly fortunate
auspices under which to begin our short sojourn in one of the remotest
and wildest places in the Queen's dominions.

IV.

The Scilly Islands seem, at a rough glance, to form a great irregular
circle, enclosing a kind of lagoon of sea, communicating by various
channels with the main ocean all around.

The circumference of the largest of the group is, as we heard, not more
than thirteen miles. Five of the islands are inhabited; the rest may be
generally described as masses of rock, wonderfully varied in shape and
size. Inland, in the larger islands, the earth, where it is not planted
or sown, is covered with heather and with the most beautiful ferns.
Potatoes used to be the main product of Scilly; but the disease has
appeared lately in the island crops, and the potatoes have suffered so
severely that when we filled our sack for the return voyage, we were
obliged to allow for two-thirds of our supply proving unfit for use. The
views inland are chiefly remarkable as natural panoramas of land and
sea--the two always presenting themselves intermixed in the loveliest
varieties of form and colour. On the coast, the granite rocks, though
not notably high, take the most wildly and magnificently picturesque
shapes. They are rent into the strangest chasms and piled up in the
grandest confusion; and they look down, every here and there, on the
loveliest little sandy bays, where the sea, in calm weather, is as
tenderly blue and as limpid in its clearness as the Mediterranean
itself. The softness and purity of the climate may be imagined, when I
state that in the winter none of the freshwater pools are strongly
enough frozen to bear being skated o