We now considered that we had arrived at the beginning of the end of our journey, and left Truro with the determination to reach Land’s End on the morrow, Saturday.  We continued our walk as near the sea as the rivers or inlets would admit, for we were anxious to see as much as possible of the fine rock scenery of the Cornish coast.  We were in the best of health and spirits, and a thirty-mile walk seemed to have no effect upon us whatever, beyond causing a feeling of drowsiness when entering our hotel for the night.

We soon arrived at the quaint little village with a name, as my brother said, almost as long as itself, Perranarworthal, connected with Falmouth by a creek, which seemed to have made an effort to cross Cornwall from one side to the other, or from one Channel to the other.  It was at Falmouth that on one dark stormy night some years previously the ship my brother was travelling by called for cargo, and the shelter of the harbour was much appreciated after passing through the stormy sea outside.  Perran in the name of the village meant the same as Piran, and the small church there was dedicated to that saint, who deserved to be called the St. Patrick of Cornwall, for he occupied the same position in the popular imagination here as that saint did in Ireland.  It was in this parish that St. Piran had his Holy Well, but that had now disappeared, for accidentally it had been drained off by mining operations.

Gwennap was only about three miles away—­formerly the centre of the richest mining district in Cornwall, the mines there being nearly six hundred yards deep, and the total length of the roads or workings in them about sixty miles.  No similar space in the Old World contained so much mineral wealth, for the value of the tin mined during one century was estimated at ten million pounds sterling.  After the mines were abandoned the neighbourhood presented a desolate and ruined appearance.

[Illustration:  OLD ST. MARY’S CHURCH, TRURO. (The Cathedral of Truro is now built on the site where this old church formerly stood.)]

Many human remains belonging to past ages had been found buried in the sands in this neighbourhood; but Gwennap had one glorious memory of the departed dead, for John Wesley visited the village several times to preach to the miners, and on one occasion (1762), on a very windy day, when the sound of his voice was being carried away by the wind, he tried the experiment—­which proved a great success—­of preaching in the bottom of a wide dry pit, the miners standing round him on the sloping sides and round the top.  The pit was supposed to have been formed by subsidences resulting from the mining operations below, and as he used it on subsequent occasions when preaching to immense congregations, it became known as “Wesley’s Preaching Pit.”  It must have been a pathetic sight when, in his eighty-fifth year, he preached his last sermon there.  “His open-air preaching was powerful in the extreme, his energy and depth