Here it was that I first caught sight of two bold headlands, looming up, a little retired from the shore, and giving a dignity to the coast at this particular spot, by which it is not generally distinguished. We soon entered the bay of Newhaven, and the town itself began to appear, embosomed very snugly between the two mountains, and deriving no little beauty from their prominent share in its surrounding scenery. I judged them not more than four or five hundred feet high, but they are marked with elegant peaks, and present a bold perpendicular front of trap-rock, which, with the bay and harbour in the foreground, and a fine outline of hills sloping away towards the horizon, conveys a most agreeable impression to the approaching stranger of the region he is about to visit. A person who stood looking out very near me, gave me the information that the twin mountains were called, from their geographical relations to the meridian of Newhaven, East and West Rocks, and added the remark, for which I was hardly prepared, that West Rock was celebrated as having afforded a refuge to the regicides Goffe and Whalley.
My fellow-passenger, observing my interest in this statement, went on to tell me, in substance, as follows. A cleft in its rugged rocks was once actually inhabited by those scape-goats, and still goes by the name of "The Regicides' Cave." Newhaven, moreover, contains the graves of these men, and regards them with such remarkable veneration, that even the railroad speed of progress and improvement has been checked to keep them inviolate;--a tribute which, in America, must be regarded as very marked, since no ordinary obstacle ever is allowed to interfere with their perpetual "go-ahead." It seems the ancient grave-yard, where the regicides repose, was found very desirable for a public square; and as a mimic Père-la-Chaise had just been created in the outskirts of the town, away went coffins and bones, grave-stones and sepulchral effigies, and monumental urns, to plant the new city of the dead, and make way for living dogs, as better than defunct lions. Such a resurrection the towns-folk gave to their respectable grandfathers and grandmothers; but not to the relics of the regicides. At these shrines of murder and rebellion, the spade and the mattock stood still; and their once restless tenants, after shifting between so many disturbances while living, were suffered to sleep on, in a kind of sepulchral limbo, between the marble in Westminster Abbey, to which they once aspired, and the ditch at Tyburn, which they so narrowly escaped.