Soon we began to sight ship after ship, and found ourselves on the great south-western high-road of the Atlantic; and found ourselves, too, nearing Niflheim day by day.  Colder and colder grew the wind, lower the sun, darker the cloud-world overhead; and we went on deck each morning, with some additional garment on, sorely against our wills.  Only on the very day on which we sighted land, we had one of those treacherously beautiful days which occur, now and then, in an English February, mild, still, and shining, if not with keen joyful blaze, at least with a cheerful and tender gleam from sea and sky.

The Land’s End was visible at a great distance; and as we neared the Lizard, we could see not only the lighthouses on the Cliff, and every well-known cove and rock from Mullion and Kynance round to St. Keverne, but far inland likewise.  Breage Church, and the great tin-works of Wheal Vor, stood out hard against the sky.  We could see up the Looe Pool to Helston Church, and away beyond it, till we fancied that we could almost discern, across the isthmus, the sacred hill of Carnbrea.

Along the Cornish shore we ran, through a sea swarming with sails:  an exciting contrast to the loneliness of the wide ocean which we had left—­and so on to Plymouth Sound.

The last time I had been on that water, I was looking up in awe at Sir Edward Codrington’s fleet just home from the battle of Navarino.  Even then, as a mere boy, I was struck by the grand symmetry of that ample basin:  the break water—­then unfinished—­lying across the centre; the heights of Bovisand and Cawsand, and those again of Mount Batten and Mount Edgecumbe, left and right; the citadel and the Hoe across the bottom of the Sound, the southern sun full on their walls, with the twin harbours and their forests of masts, winding away into dim distance on each side; and behind all and above all, the purple range of Dartmoor, with the black rain-clouds crawling along its top.  And now, after nearly forty years, the place looked to me even more grand than my recollections had pictured it.  The newer fortifications have added to the moral effect of the scene, without taking away from its physical beauty:  and I heard without surprise—­though not without pride—­the foreigners express their admiration of this, their first specimen of an English port.

We steamed away again, after landing our letters, close past the dear old Mewstone.  The warrener’s hut stood on it still:  and I wondered whether the old he-goat, who used to terrify me as a boy, had left any long-bearded descendants.  Then under the Revelstoke and Bolt Head cliffs, with just one flying glance up into the hidden nooks of delicious little Salcombe, and away south-west into the night, bound for Cherbourg, and a very different scene.