employed for building purposes, and the other
consisting of smooth stones applied to
ornamental purposes. A day may be worse
spent than in following blocks of these stones
from the quarry to the workshop. Cornwall,
like the north of Scotland, owes much of its
wealth to granite. Much of the country
consists of stern, bald, bare granite hills, and
the people are well entitled to any benefit
derivable from quarrying, cutting, polishing,
and selling their stone riches.

The Cornish folk, we may be well assured,
made good use of granite at home before they
began to sell it to their neighbours. We see
plenty of granite houses, and posts and
pavings, in places where this stone is more
plentiful than any other. Besides the huge
masses of granite which occupy a large
area of the country, there are veins called
elvans—stripes of granite which appear to
have been protruded into the great masses
of rock. These elvans vary from a few
inches to two or three hundred feet in width,
and the substance of which they are formed
is a kind of granite, so soft in some instances
as to be used as crucible clay, and so hard in
others as to be available for engineering and
building purposes. Hence the Cornish
people employ both granite and elvans.
Their neighbours in Devonshire have also
granite quarries upon Dartmoor among the
other useful products of that picturesque table
land: at Hey Tor, they are sending the granite
down to the sea at Teignmouth, and from
King Tor they ship it at Plymouth. But
Cornwall is far richer in available granite
quarries. There are those of the Brown
Willy, whence the granite finds its way to
the sea at Wadebridge; there are those of
the Cheesewing, whence the granite travels
by tramway to Liskeard; there are those of
the far valley near Lostwithiel, which find an
outlet at Par Harbour; there is the Penryn
granite, the most abundant and the best
known in Cornwall, which is conveyed from
Falmouth harbour to various parts of
England; and there are quarries in other
directions. Something like ten thousand
tons of granite per year are exported from
the Penryn quarries alone, at prices varying
from about two shillings to three shillings
per cubic foot. The county altogether
furnishes a prodigious amount of this hard and
valuable stone for bridges, pavements, rolling-
stones, columns, gateposts, and all the
useful purposes for which granite can be
used. Many of the old churches and
mansions in Cornwall have been built of the
harder specimens of elvan. If we would
examine the appearance and structure of
Cornish granite, let us wend our way
to London Bridge; or, as that is not
exactly the locality for pursuing mineralogical
researches, let us rather go to the quieter
region of Waterloo Bridge, where the world
is not in such a desperate bustle.

If granite be so hard that it requires the
attrition of millions of feet during thousands of
days to make any perceptible impression on a
granite pavement, we may be certain that
the quarrying of such a material must be
rather formidable work. Such it is, in truth;
and yet not uninteresting work either. It is
worth looking at; and if any one, being
within reach of the Cornish regions,
should wish to visit a granite quarry, we
would venture to suggest the neighbourhood
of Liskeard as a favourable locality. The
rambler will, in the first place, not have to
go far into Cornwall; and when there he can
kill—not merely the traditional number of
two birds—but as many as three birds, with
one stone. He can visit the Caradon copper
mines; he can roam around, and, perchance,
scramble up the extraordinary and fantastic
Cheesewring; and he can witness the tough
labours of the granite quarrymen.

Leaving the quaint old town of Liskeard,
and turning our faces towards the north, we
speedily come to rising ground, which
presents bolder and sterner granitic features
as we advance. A tramway meets us, and
we may do well to follow the line of this
tramway up to the point where the busy
operations are carried on. The Granite
Company, and the Caradon Mining Companies,
have very wisely clubbed their means
together, to form a tramway, which may carry
down to Liskeard the granite from the one,
and the copper ore from the others. At some
parts the team-carts are drawn along by
horses; at others they are managed by ropes;
but they have not yet been dignified by the
use of steam locomotives. We ascend the
slope of the hills by this tramway, and
obtain a commanding view of the strange,
hilly, treeless district around. Caradon is
the name of a hill; and, as the flanks of this
hill are rich in copper ore, there are numerous
mines hereabouts: East Caradon, West
Caradon, South Caradon, Caradon Wood,
Caradon Vale, and so forth. It is pleasant
to glance at the aboveground works of some
of these mines; to see how busily the boys
and girls are employed upon the ore which
the miners have brought up from the bosom
of the earth; and to see how the ore is
prepared for the inspection of the assayers and
smelters. But we have nothing to do with
the mines here; we are quarry-hunting, and
trudge onward until we reach the Cheesewring.

This Cheesewring is a strange, wild, inexplicable
object, as many a picture has made
manifest to us. We may say either that the
hill which bears the heap of stones is the
Cheesewring, or that the heap itself is the
Cheesewring; we believe the latter to have
really first obtained the name. The hill
itself is of some considerable elevation, as
wild and desolate as a granite hill can well
be, and surrounded by other hills as wild
and bare as itself. Huge fragments of
granite are lying about; and, at the summit