Excerpt from Popular Romances of the West of England, or the Drolls, Traditions, and Superstitions of Old Cornwall During the last few years a new interest has been awakened, and the West of England has attracted the attention of many, who had previously neglected the scenes of interest, and the spots of beauty, which are to be found in our own island. The rugged granite range of Dartmoor, rich with the golden furze the moorlands of Cornwall, with their mighty T ors and giant boulders fringed with ferns and framed in masses of purple heath; the stern coasts, washed by an emerald sea, quaint with rocks carved into grotesque forms by the beating of waves and winds, spread with the green samphire and coated with yellow lichens; are now found to have a peculiar - though a wild - often a savage - beauty. The wood-clad valleys, ringing with the rush of rivers, and the sheltered plains, rich with an almost tropical vegetation, present new features of interest to the stranger's eyes, in the varied characters of the organisation native to that south-western clime. The railways give great facilities for visiting those scenes, of which the public eagerly avail themselves. But they have robbed the West of England of half its interest, by dispelling the spectres of romance which were, in hoar antiquity, the ruling spirits of the place. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.