The fishermen, looking down through the clear waters on a still day, declare they can make out the ruins of old churches and houses, and that their nets have brought them time and again articles of household economy, pieces of broken doors and roofs and windows. Moreover, when the great wave broke hungrily over the low-lying land a Trevelyan saw the curling breakers and setting spurs to his swift white horse was carried at a mad gallop to Perranuthno. The people show you the cave in which he and the trembling horse took refuge till the wild turmoil should have died down. With what a horrified curiosity the man who lived must have looked out of his cave, watching till the great wave should subside, watching for the reappearance of all those farms and villages that only that morning had been sunning themselves in the warm light. The forest, too, those acres of beech trees stretching out from Marazion and surrounding St. Michael's Mount, that "hoar rock in a wood," what had become of them? The stormy autumn day must have closed down upon him, still looking, wondering, and hoping; but when once more the sun rose it was upon a wide stretch of waters, with the Scillies sparkling in the distance. Between them and the land was only sea--and a people overwhelmed and lost and soon to be forgotten, a people who but yesterday had gone about their daily tasks as unsuspecting as the rest! There was only Trevelyan left to say it was the "Judgment of Heaven," and he, poor soul, appears to have been too shaken, or too little of a priest, to do so.
It used to be said that when the Almighty made Ireland he had left a few handfuls of mud. He threw them into the sea and the result was the Scillies. The proof thereof is that, like Ireland, the Scillies have no snakes!
They may be only a few handfuls of stony mud, but they are lovely islands, though for those whom salt water makes queasy, a little difficult to reach. There is, in fact, a most depressing story told of a lady who was so ill during the four hours' passage from Penzance that when within sight of the islands but before she could be landed she actually died of heart failure.
The Scillies number about 145, twenty-four of which are cultivated, but only five inhabited--St. Mary's, Tresco, St. Martin's, St. Agnes, and Bryher; while Scilly, the islet which has given its name to the group, is an unimportant rock near Bryher.