of sixty.

Four of us started on our road to the north as fit as possible, and
we were courageous enough to think our automobile was likewise, as it
was a tried and trusty friend with some twenty thousand miles to its
credit, and with never a breakage so far as its mechanism was
concerned.

[Illustration: St. Michael's Mount]

We had stayed a few days at Penzance and got to knew something of
Cornwall and things Cornish. Unquestionably Cornwall is the least
spoiled section of Southern Britain; its coastline is rocky and
serrated, and its tors and hills and rills are about as wild and
unspoiled by the hand of man as can be imagined. There is a vast
literature on the subject if one cares to read it, and the modern
fictionists (like the painter-men) have even developed a "Cornish
school." However, there need be no discussion of its merits or
demerits here.

In Mount's Bay is the Cornish counterpart of Normandy's St. Michel's
Mount. It is by no means so great or imposing, or endowed with such a
wealth of architectural charm as the cross-channel Mont St. Michel,
but the English St. Michael's Mount, a granite rock rising from the
sea two hundred and fifty or more feet, was sufficient of an
attraction to draw us to Penzance for our headquarters and to keep us
till we had visited its castle of the days of Charles II. There is no
question of the age of St. Michael's Mount, for Ptolemy charted it in
Roman days, and the Roman warriors, who battled with the Britons,
made spear-heads and hatchets of the tin and iron which they dug from
its rocky defences.

The grim, unlovely little hotel at Land's End sheltered us the night
before the commencement of our journey north, and the Longships
Lighthouse flashed its warning in through our open bedroom window all
the night long and made us dream of wicked and unworldly monster
automobiles bearing down upon us with a great blazing _phare_ which
blotted out all else.

The nightmare passed, we got ourselves together at five in the
morning, drank tepid tea, and ate the inevitable bacon and eggs
furnished one for breakfast in England, and, before lunch, had passed
Bodmin, crossed Bodmin moor (a little Exmoor), and skirted Dartmoor,
just north of Great Links Tor, arriving at Exeter at high noon.

Pople's New London Hotel at Exeter is the headquarters of the
Automobile Club, is patronized by Royalty (so the advertisements
say), and is a very satisfactory-looking old-century inn which has