and far beyond it new piers stretch encircling arms of granite round a new
harbor, southward of which the lighthouse stands and winks his sleepless
golden eye from dusk to dawn. Within this harbor, when the fishing fleet is
at home, lie jungles of stout masts, row upon row, with here and there a
sail, carrying on the color of the plowed fields above the village, and
elsewhere, scraps of flaming bunting flashing like flowers in a reed bed.
Behind the masts, along the barbican, the cottages stand close and thick,
then clamber and straggle up the acclivities behind, decreasing in their
numbers as they ascend. Smoke trails inland on the wind--black as a thin
crepe veil, from the funnel of a coal "tramp" about to leave the harbor,
blue from the dry wood burning on a hundred cottage hearths. A smell of
fish--where great split pollocks hang drying in the sun--of tar and tan and
twine--where nets and cordage lie spread upon low walls and open
spaces--gives to Newlyn an odor all its own; but aloft, above the village
air, spring is dancing, sweet-scented, light-footed in the hedgerows,
through the woods and on the wild moors which stretch inland away. There
the gold of the gorse flames in many a sudden sheet and splash over the
wastes whereon last year's ling-bloom, all sere and gray, makes a
sad-colored world. But the season's change is coming fast. Celandines
twinkle everywhere, and primroses, more tardy and more coy, already open
wondering eyes. The sea lies smooth with a surface just wind-kissed and
strewed with a glory of sun-stars. Away to the east, at a point from which
brown hills, dotted with white dwellings, tend in long undulations to the
cliffs of the Lizard, under fair clouds all banked and sunny white against
the blue, rises St. Michael's Mount, with a man's little castle capping
Nature's gaunt escarpments and rugged walls. Between Marazion and Newlyn
stretches Mount's Bay; while a mile or two of flat sea-front, over which,
like a string of pearls, roll steam clouds, from a train, bring us to
Penzance. Then--noting centers of industry where freezing works rise and
smelting of ore occupies many men (for Newlyn labors at the two extremes of