Read "An Unsentimental Journey Through Cornwall" by Dinah Mulock online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
The last thing before retiring, we had glanced out on a gloomy sea, a starless sky, pitch darkness, broken only by those moving lights on St. Michael's Mount, and thought anxiously of the morrow. It would be hard, if after journeying thus far and looking forward to it so many years, the day on which we went to the Land's End should turn out a wet day! Still "hope on, hope ever," as we used to write in our copy-books. Some of us, I think, still go on writing it in empty air, and will do so till the hand is dust.
It was with a feeling almost of solemnity that we woke and looked out on the dawn, grey and misty, but still not wet. To be just on the point of gaining the wish of a life-time, however small, is a fact rare enough to have a certain pathos in it. We slept again, and trusted for the best, which by breakfast-time really came, in flickering sun-gleams, and bits of hopeful blue sky. We wondered for the last time, as we had wondered for half a century, "what the Land's End would be like," and then started, rather thoughtful than merry, to find out the truth of the case.