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                              TREVETHLAN:

                            A Cornish Story.

                      BY WILLIAM DAVY WATSON, ESQ.

                           BARRISTER-AT-LAW.


    IN THREE VOLUMES.
    VOL. III.

    LONDON:
    SMITH, ELDER AND CO., 65, CORNHILL.
    1848.

    London:
    Printed by STEWART and MURRAY,
    Old Bailey.




TREVETHLAN.




CHAPTER I.

     _Menenius._ What work's, my countrymen, in hand? Where go you
     with bats and clubs? The matter? Speak, I pray you.

     _Citizen._ Our business is not unknown to the senate; they have
     had inkling, this fortnight, what we intend to do, which now
     we'll show 'em in deeds. They say poor suitors have strong
     breath: they shall know we have strong arms too.

     Shakspeare.


Among the most striking features of the scenery of West Cornwall, are
the fantastic piles of bare granite which rise occasionally from the
summit of an upland, and to a distant spectator present the exact
semblance of a castle, with towers, turrets, and outworks. So a
stranger, standing on Cape Cornwall and looking towards the Land's End,
might imagine he there beheld the fortress whose sanguinary sieges
obtained for that promontory its ancient name of the Headland of Blood.
Or again, reclining on the moorland, near the cromlech of Morvah, while
the sun was sinking behind Carnyorth, he might fancy that at the
red-edged battlements on the ridge, the original inhabitants of the
country made their last stand against the invaders from the German
Ocean.

Approach soon destroys the illusion. And it is superfluous to observe
that the warriors of those times had no notion of the structures which
these caprices of nature mimic--the castles of our Plantagenets and
Tudors. Their real fortresses still exist to afford employment to the
antiquary, and inspiration to the poet; and to one of them we now invite
the reader to accompany us.

Castle Dinas occupies the crest of the highest ground between the
picturesque village of Gulvall and the pilchard-perfumed town of St.
Ives, and commands an uninterrupted view both of Mount's Bay and of the
Irish Sea. Two concentric ramparts of unhewn stones, flung together more
rudely than a Parisian barricade, exhibiting the science of
fortification in its very infancy, inclose a circular area of
considerable extent. From it the ground <DW72>s, not very rapidly, on all
sides; and as there are no screens, an occupant of the camp can see an
approaching friend or enemy some time before he arrives. Within the
inner circle some prosaic favourer of picnics has erected a square
_folly_, with a turret at each angle, not harmonizing very well with
local associations, but convenient in case of a shower of rain.

Around the folly, on the night which followed the departure of the
orphans of Trevethlan from the home of their fathers, was pacing a
stalwart man of weather-beaten aspect, with an impatient and irregular
gait. The sun had sunk below the horizon, and all the south and west
quarters of the sky were covered with heavy masses of cloud, from behind
which, at intervals, came the low mutterings of distant thunder. Flashes
of lightning followed one another in quick succession, becoming more and
more brilliant as the shades of evening grew deeper. They broke from
various quarters of the horizon, but particularly from the