braided their blue-black hair into some such quaint patterns.
For this patch of population was as much a corner of Cornwall
as Cornwall is a corner of England; a tragic and unique race,
small and interrelated like a Celtic clan. The clan was older
than the Vane family, though that was old as county families go.
For in many such parts of England it is the aristocrats who are
the latest arrivals. It was the sort of racial type that is
supposed to be passing, and perhaps has already passed.

The obnoxious objects stood some hundred yards away from the speaker,
who waved toward them with his ax; and there was something suggestive
in the comparison. That coast, to begin with, stretching toward
the sunset, was itself almost as fantastic as a sunset cloud.
It was cut out against the emerald or indigo of the sea in graven
horns and crescents that might be the cast or mold of some such
crested serpents; and, beneath, was pierced and fretted by caves
and crevices, as if by the boring of some such titanic worms.
Over and above this draconian architecture of the earth a veil
of gray woods hung thinner like a vapor; woods which the witchcraft
of the sea had, as usual, both blighted and blown out of shape.
To the right the trees trailed along the sea front in a single line,
each drawn out in thin wild lines like a caricature. At the other end
of their extent they multiplied into a huddle of hunchbacked trees,
a wood spreading toward a projecting part of the high coast.
It was here that the sight appeared to which so many eyes and minds
seemed to be almost automatically turning.

Out of the middle of this low, and more or less level wood,
rose three separate stems that shot up and soared into the sky like a
lighthouse out of the waves or a church spire out of the village roofs.