Sporting Sketches With Pen And Pencil

Titans had been playing at marbles, and had to leave their game in a hurry; with here and there vast heaps of dirt as big as the Pyramids, and the huge arm of an ugly pumping engine working up and down with dreary monotony. Still, old friend, thou hast valleys and corners and crannies of unexampled beauty, with crystal streams (that is where the mines and the china clay don't get at them) tumbling from rock to rock in pretty pools amid feathery, heathery, ferny foliage?(delicious alliteration)?not to be beaten in Britain. When the mines or the china clay do contaminate them, however, nothing so weird and hideous is to be seen in nature. I never shall forget the first time I saw a Cornish ravine with a streampolluted with china clay running through it. It was so unnatural, so unaccountable, so ghastly, that it almost made me sick to look at it. There was the green foliage, the grey rocks, the heather and fern intermixed, to which the sparkling water would have made such a finish; and, instead of that, there was a milk-white loathsome channel running through the valley. You cannot realise the effect of this unless you see it; and (always supposing the china clay works do not belong to you) the indignation which fills one's bosom at this outrage on nature is exceedingly strong. These feathery streams and pretty valleys, in my young days, were rare places for woodcock, while the moorland abounded in snipe. I remember my first woodcock, it was a triumph of stra...