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The Land's End: A Naturalist's Impressions In West Cornwall, Illustrated

by W. H. Hudson · English · Gutenberg #47990 · 469,426 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Land's End: A Naturalist's Impressions In West Cornwall, Illustrated

Author: W. H. Hudson

Illustrator: A. L. Collins


        
Release date: January 18, 2015 [eBook #47990]
                Most recently updated: October 24, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LAND'S END: A NATURALIST'S IMPRESSIONS IN WEST CORNWALL, ILLUSTRATED ***

THE LAND'S END

A NATURALIST'S IMPRESSIONS IN WEST CORNWALL

By W. H. Hudson

With Forty-Nine Illustrations By A. L. Collins

New York, D. Appleton And Company

1908

[Illustration: 0017]




THE LAND'S END




CHAPTER I WINTERING IN WEST CORNWALL

_England's "observables"--Why I delayed visiting Cornwall--A vision
of the Land's End-Flight to St. Ives-Climate-The old town-The
fishermen-Their love of children-Drowned babes--The fishing fleet going
out at sunset-Old memories suggested-Jackdaws at St. Ives--Feeding the
birds--A greedy sheep-dog-Daws show their intelligence--Daws on the
roofs--Their morning pastime-Dialogue between two daws._

|KNOW," said wise old Fuller, "most of the rooms of thy native country
before thou goest over the threshold thereof. Especially seeing England
presents thee with so many observables." But if we were to follow this
advice there would be no getting out of the country at all. It is too
rich in its way: the rooms are too many and too well-furnished with
observables. Take my case. I have been going on rambles about the land
for a good many years, and though the West Country had the greatest
attraction for me, I never got over the Tamar, nor even so far as
Plymouth, simply because I had not the time, albeit my time was my own.
Or because there was enough and more than enough to satisfy me on this
side of the boundary. It is true that one desires to see and know all
places, but is in no hurry to go from a rich to a poor one. I was told
by every one of my friends that it was the most interesting county in
England, and doubtless it is so to them, but I knew it could not be so
to me because of the comparative poverty of the fauna, seeing that the
observables which chiefly draw me are the living creatures-the wild
life-and not hills and valleys and granite and serpentine cliffs and
seas of Mediterranean blue. These are but the setting of the shining
living gems, and we know the finest of these, which gave most lustre to
the scene, have been taken out and cast away.

Cornwall to me was just the Land's End-"dark Bolerium, seat of
storms"-that famous foreland of which a vast but misty picture formed in
childhood remains in the mind, and if I ever felt any strong desire
to visit Cornwall it was to look upon that scene. Then came a day in
November, 1905, when, having settled to go away somewhere for a season,
I all at once made up my mind to visit the unknown peninsula and to go
straight away to the very end. It almost astonished me when I alighted
from my train at St. Ives to think I had travelled three hundred and
twenty odd miles with less discomfort and weariness than I usually
experience on any journey of a hundred.

It is common, I think, for lovers of walking to dislike the railway. So
smoothly had I been carried in this flight to the furthest west that I
might have been sailing in a balloon; and as for the time occupied it
would surely be no bad progress for a migrating bird, travelling, let
us say, from Middlesex to Africa, to cover the distance I had come in a
little more than seven hours!

St. Ives is on the north side of the rounded western extremity of
Cornwall, and from the little green hill, called the "Island," which
rises above and partly shelters the town, you look out upon the wide
Atlantic, the sea that has always a trouble on it and that cannot be
quiet; and standing there with the great waves breaking on the black
granite rocks at your feet, they will tell you that there is no land
between you and America. Nevertheless, after London, I wanted no better
climate; for though it rained heavily on many days in December and the
wind blew with tremendous force, the temperature was singularly mild,
with an agreeable softness in the air and sunshine breaking out on
the cloudiest days. The weather could be described as "delicate" with
tempestuous intervals. On bright, windless days I saw the peacock
butterfly abroad and heard that idle song of the corn bunting,
associated in our minds with green or yellow fields and sultry weather.
I was still more surprised one day late in December at meeting with a
lively wheatear, flitting from stone to stone near the Land's End. This
one had discovered that it was not necessary to fly all the way to North
Africa to find a place to winter in. Early in February I found the adder
abroad.

[Illustration: 0020]

The town, viewed from the outside-the old fishing town, which does not
include the numerous villas, terraces, and other modern erections on the
neighbouring heights-appears very small indeed. It is small, for when
you once master its intricacies you can walk through from end to end in
about five or six minutes. But the houses are closely packed, or rather
jumbled together with the narrowest and crookedest streets and courts
in which to get about or up and down. They have a look of individuality,
like a crowd of big rough men pushing and elbowing one another for room,
and you can see how this haphazard condition has come about when you
stumble by chance on a huge mass of rock thrusting up out of the
earth among the houses. There was, in fact, just this little sheltered
depression in a stony place to build upon, and the first settlers, no
doubt, set their houses just where and how they could among the rocks,
and when more room was wanted more rocks were broken down and other
houses added until the town as we find it resulted. It is all rude and
irregular, as if produced by chance or nature, and altogether reminds
one of a rabbit warren or the interior of an ants' nest.

It cannot be nice to live in such a warren or rookery, except to those
who were born in it; nevertheless it is curiously attractive, and I,
although a disliker of towns or congeries of houses, found a novel
pleasure in poking about it, getting into doorways and chance openings
to be out of the way of a passing cart which as a rule would take up the
whole width of the street. Outside the houses hung the wet oilskins
and big sea-boots to dry, and at the doors women with shawls over their
heads stand gossiping. When the men are asleep or away and the children
at school these appear to be the only inhabitants, except the cats. You
find one at every few yards usually occupied with the head of a mackerel
or herring. The appearance was perhaps even better by night when the
narrow crooked ways are very dark except at some rare spot where a lamp
casts a mysterious light on some quaint old corner building and affords
a glimpse into a dimly-seen street beyond ending in deep gloom.

In this nest or hive are packed about eight hundred fishermen with their
wives and children, their old fathers and mothers, and other members
of the community who do not go in the boats. The fishermen are the most
interesting in appearance; it is a relief, a positive pleasure to see
in England a people clothed not in that ugly dress which is now so
universal, but in one suitable to their own life and work--their
ponderous sea-boots and short shirt-shaped oilies of many shades of
colour from dirty white and pale yellow to deep reds and maroons. In
speech and manners they are rough and brusque, and this, too, like
their dress and lurching gait, comes, as it were, by nature; for of all
occupations, this of wresting a poor and precarious livelihood from
the wind-vexed seas under the black night skies in their open boats is
assuredly the hardest and most trying to a man's temper. The navvy and
the quarryman, the labourer on the land, here where the land is half
rock, even the tin-miner deep down in the bowels of the earth, have a
less discomfortable and anxious life. That they are not satisfied with
it one soon discovers; Canada calls them, and Africa, and other distant
lands, and unhappily, as in most places, it is always the best men that
go. Possibly this accounts for the change for the worse in the people
which some have noted in recent years. Nevertheless they are a good
people still, righteous in their own peculiar way, and so independent
that in bad times, as when the fishing fails, hunger and cold are more
endurable to them than charity. They are a clannish people, and it is
consequently not to be wondered at that they have no subscription clubs
or friendly societies of any kind to aid them in times of want and
sickness such as are now almost universal among the working classes.
These benefits of our civilisation will doubtless come to them in time:
then their clannishness-the old "One and All" spirit of Cornishmen
generally-being no longer needed, will decay. It is after all but
another word for solidarity, the strong, natural, or family bond
which unites the members of a community which was once, in ruder ages,
everywhere, to make social life possible, and has survived here solely
because of Cornwall's isolated position. Unfortunately we cannot make
any advance-cannot gain anything anywhere without a corresponding loss
somewhere. Will it be better for this people when the change comes-when
the machine we call "civilisation" has taken the place of the spirit
of mutual help in the members of the community? 'Tis an idle question,
since we cannot have two systems of life. At present, in our "backward"
districts, we have two, but they are in perpetual conflict, and one must
overcome the other; and if there be any beautiful growths in the old and
unfit, which is passing away, they must undoubtedly perish with it.

One of the most pleasing traits of the Cornish people, which is but one
manifestation of the spirit I have been speaking about, is their love
for little children. Nowhere in the kingdom, town or country, do you see
a brighter, happier, better-dressed company of small children than here
in the narrow stony ways of the old fishing town. The rudest men exhibit
a strange tenderness towards their little ones; and not only their
own, since they regard all children with a kind of parental feeling. An
incident which occurred in the early part of December, and its effects
on the people, may be given here as an illustration. One morning when
the boats came in it was reported that one of the men had been lost.
"Poor fellow!" was all that was said about it. And that is how it is all
the world over among men who have dangerous occupations: the loss of a
comrade is a not uncommon experience, and the shock is very slight and
quickly vanishes. But there was no such indifference when, two or three
days later, one of the herring-boats brought in the corpse of a small
child which had been fished up in the Bay-a pretty little well-nourished
boy, decently dressed, aged about two years and a half. Where the child
belonged and how it came to be in the sea was not discovered until long
afterwards, but the intensity of the feeling displayed was a surprise to
me. For several days little else was talked of both in St. Ives and the
villages and farms in the neighbourhood, and they talked of it, both
men and women, with tears in their voices as though the death of this
unknown child had been a personal loss.

This incident served to recall others, of St. Ives children lost and
drowned in past years, especially this very pathetic one of three little
things who went out to pick flowers one afternoon and were lost.

[Illustration: 0025]

They were two sisters, aged eight and nine respectively, and their
little brother, about six or seven years old. They rambled along the
rough heath by Carbis Bay to the Towans, near Lelant, where, climbing
about among the sand-hills, they lost all sense of direction. There
meeting a man who spoke roughly to them and ordered them home they
became terrified and ran away to the sea-front, and, climbing down the
cliff, hid themselves in a cave they found there. By and by it began to
grow dark, and there were sounds above as of loud talking and shouts and
of a galloping horse, all which added to their fear and caused them to
go further into their dark wet house of refuge. They did not know, poor
children, that the cries were uttered by those who were seeking for
them! After dark the tide rose and covered the sandy floor of the cave,
and to escape it they climbed on to a rocky shelf where they could keep
dry, and there huddled together to keep warm, and being very tired, they
eventually fell asleep. In the morning when it grew light the sisters
woke, stiff and cold, to find that their poor little brother had fallen
from the ledge in his sleep and had been carried out by the sea. His
body was recovered later. The two survivors, now middle-aged women,
still live in the town.

The most interesting hour of the day at St. Ives was in the afternoon or
evening, the time depending on the tide, when the men issued from their
houses and came lurching down the little crooked stone streets and
courts to the cove or harbour to get the boats out for the night's
fishing. It is a very small harbour in the corner of the bay-a roughly
shaped half-moon with two little stone piers for horns, with just room
enough inside to accommodate the fleet of about 150 boats. The best
spectacle is when they are taken out at or near sunset in fair weather,
when the subdued light gives a touch of tenderness and mystery to sea
and sky, and the boats, singly, in twos and threes, and in groups
of half a dozen, drift out from the harbour and go away in a kind of
procession over the sea. The black forms on the moving darkening water
and the shapely deep-red sails glowing in the level light have then a
beauty, an _expression_, which comes as a surprise to one unaccustomed
to such a scene. The expression is due to association-to vague
suggestions of a resemblance in this to other scenes. We may be unable
to recall them; the feeling returns but without the mental image of the
scene which originally produced it. It was not until I had watched the
boats going out on two or three successive evenings that an ancient
memory returned to me.

Sitting or walking by the margin of some wide lake or marsh in a
distant land, I am watching a company of birds of some large majestic
kind-stork, wood-ibis, or flamingo-standing at rest in the shallow
water, which reflects their forms. By and by one of the birds steps out
of the crowd and moves leisurely away, then, slowly unfolding his broad
wings, launches himself on the air and goes off, flying very low over
the water. Another follows, then, after an interval, another, then
still others, in twos and threes and halfdozens, until the last bird
has opened his wings and the entire flock is seen moving away in a loose
procession over the lake.

Just in that way did the crowd of boats move by degrees from their
resting-place, shake out their wing-like sails, and stream away over the
sea.

That was one scene; there were faint suggestions of many others, only
a few of which I could recover; one was of large, dark red-winged
butterflies, seen at rest with closed wings, congregated on wind-swayed
reeds and other slender plants. It was the shape and deep red colour
of the sails and the way they hung from the masts and cordage which
restored this butterfly picture to my mind. And in every instance in
which a resemblance could be traced it turned out to be to some natural
and invariably to a beautiful object or scene. The spectacle had, in
fact, that charm, which is so rare in man's work, of something wholly
natural, which fits into the scene and is part and parcel with nature
itself.

In buildings we get a similar effect at the two extremes-in the humblest
and the highest work of man's hands; in the small old thatched
and rose-and creeper-covered cottage in perfect harmony with its
surroundings, and in ancient majestic castles and cathedrals, in which
the sharp lines and contours have been blurred by decay of the material
and the whole surface weathered and stained with lichen and alga and in
many cases partially draped with ivy.

It struck me before I had been long in St. Ives that, in spite of the
delightful mildness of the climate and the charm of the place, nobody
but myself was wintering there. The lodging-houses were quite empty; the
people were the natives or else the artists, who form a pretty numerous
colony. The few others to be seen were visitors for the day from
Penzance, Falmouth, or some other spot in the "Cornish Riviera."
This was not a cause of regret, seeing there were birds for society,
especially that old favourite, the jackdaw.

[Illustration: 0029]

Doubtless he is to be seen there all the year round as he is so common
a town bird all over the country, but at St. Ives many of the
cliffbreeding daws settle down regularly for the winter and exist very
comfortably on the fish and other refuse thrown into the streets. Very
soon I established a sort of friendship with a few of these birds; for
birds I must have, in town or country-free birds I mean, as the captive
bird only makes me melancholy--and in winter I feed them whether they
are in want or not. It is an old habit of mine, first practised in
early life in June and July, the cold winter months in the southern
hemisphere, in a land where the English sparrow was not. Now, unhappily,
he is there and a great deal too abundant. I fed a better sparrow in
those vanished days, smaller and more prettily shaped than our bird,
with a small crest on his head and a sweet delicate little song. But
in England one really gets far more pleasure from feeding the birds on
account of the number of different species which are willing to be our
pensioners. At St. Ives I first stayed at a house in The Terrace facing
the sea-front, and there were no gardens there, so that I had to feed
them out in the road. First there were only sparrows, then a pair of
jackdaws turned up, and soon others joined them until I had about a
score of them. By and by a very big shaggy sheep-dog, belonging to a
carter, discovered that there was food to be got at eight o'clock at
that spot in the road, and he too came very punctually every day and
thoughtlessly gobbled it all up himself. After two or three days of this
sort of thing, I felt that it ought not to be allowed to continue, and
as the daws were of the same mind and loyally seconded my efforts to
stop it we were soon successful. My plan was to go out and scatter the
scraps and crusts far and wide over the road, and while the greedy dog
galloped about from crust to crust the daws, hovering overhead, dropped
down and snatched them one by one away before he could reach them.

Later, when leaving St. Ives, I asked the landlady to explain to the
birds on the following morning the reason of there being nothing
for them, and to request them to go quietly away. They were very
intelligent, I said, and would understand; but on my return, a month
later, she said they had not understood the message, or had not believed
her, as they had continued to come for several mornings, and had seemed
very much put out. It was plain they had kept an eye on that house
during my absence, for on going out with scraps on the morning after my
return they promptly reappeared in full force on the scene.

There are few persons to feed the birds in those parts, and those few, I
fancy, are mostly visitors from other counties. It amused me to see how
the natives regarded my action; the passer-by would stop and examine the
scraps or crusts, then stare at me, and finally depart with a puzzled
expression on his countenance, or perhaps smiling at the ridiculous
thing he had witnessed.

The following winter (1906-7) I found a lodging in another part of the
town, in a terrace rather high up, where I could look from my window at
the Bay over the tiled roofs of the old town. Here I had a front garden
to feed the birds in, and, better still, the entire jackdaw population
of St. Ives, living on the roofs as is their custom, were under my eyes
and could be observed very comfortably. I discovered that they filled up
a good deal of their vacant time each morning in visiting the chimneys
from which smoke issued, just to inform themselves, as it seemed, what
was being cooked for breakfast. This was their pastime and watching them
was mine. Numbers of daws would be seen, singly, in pairs, and in groups
of three or four to half a dozen, sitting on the roofs all over the
place. As the morning progressed and more and more chimneys sent out
smoke, they would become active visiting the chimneys, where, perching
on the rims, they would put their heads down to get the smell rising
from the pot or frying-pan on the fire below. If a bird remained long
perched on a chimney-pot, his neighbours would quickly conclude that he
had come upon a particularly interesting smell and rush off to share
it with him. When the birds were too many there would be a struggle for
places, and occasionally it happened that a puff of dense black smoke
would drive them all off together.

A dozen incidents of this kind could be witnessed any morning, and I was
as much entertained as if I had been observing not birds but a lot of
lively, tricky little black men with grey pates inhabiting the roofs.
One morning when watching a pair perched facing each other on a
chimney-top their movements and gestures made me imagine that I knew
just what they were saying.

[Illustration: 0033]

First one leaning over the rim would thrust his head down into the smoke
and keep it there some time, the other would follow suit, then pulling
themselves up they would stare at each other for half a minute, then
poke their heads down again.

"A funny smell that!" one says. "I can't quite make it out, and yet I
seem to know what it is."

"Red herring," suggests the other.

"Nonsense! I know _that_ smell well enough. But I grant you it's just
a little like it, only-what shall I say?-this is a _thicker_ sort of
smell."

"I'll just have another good sniff," says the second bird. "H'm! I
wonder if it's some very old pilchards they've found stowed away in some
corner?"

"No," says the first bird, pulling his head out of the smoke and
blinking his wicked little grey eyes. "It isn't pilchards. Just one
more sniff. I've got it! A very old piece of dry salted conger they're
broiling on the coals."

"By Jove, you're right this time! It is a good thick smell! I only wish
I could drop down the flue, snatch up that bit of conger, and get clear
away with it."

"You'd soon have a jolly lot of jacks after you, I fancy. Hullo!
what are those fellows making such a to-do about--down there on that
chimney-pot? Let's go and find out."

And away they fly, to drop down and fight for places among the others.

[Illustration: 0035]




CHAPTER II GULLS AT ST. IVES

_Gulls in fishing harbours--Their numbers and beautiful appearance
at St. Ives--Different species--Robbing the fishermen--How they are
regarded--The Glaucous gull or Burgomaster--Cause of the fishermen's
feeling--A demonstration of hungry gulls--A gull tragedy._

|TO a bird lover the principal charm of St. Ives is in its gull
population. Gulls greatly outnumber all the other wild birds of the
town and harbour put together, and though they have not the peculiar
fascination of the jackdaw, which is due to that bird's intelligence and
amusing rascalities, they are very much more beautiful.

Of all feathered creatures gulls are ever the quickest to discover food
thrown accidentally in their way by man. In many lands, crows, vultures,
carrion hawks, and omnivorous feeders generally acquire the habit of
watching the movements of the human hunter and of travellers in desert
places for the sake of his leavings.

In the gulls this habit is universal; their "wide eyes that search the
sea" have discovered that where there is a ship or boat something may be
picked up by following it, and in all lands where there is a plough to
share(s.p.) the soil the plougher is pretty sure to have a following
of gulls at his heels. In harbours they are much at home, but are
especially attracted to a fishing town, and it would be hard to find one
where they make a better appearance than at St. Ives. But not solely
on account of their numbers and tameness, since they congregate at all
fishing stations and are just as tame and abundant elsewhere. At St.
Ives they make a better show because of the picturesque character of
the place itself--the small harbour, open to the wide blue bay and the
Atlantic, crowded with its forest of tall slim masts resembling a thick
grove of larches in winter, while for background there is the little
old town, its semicircle of irregular quaint and curious stone-grey and
tile-red buildings.

The gulls that congregate here are of several kinds: on most days one
can easily count five species, the most abundant being the herring and
the lesser black-backed gulls, and with them you generally see one or
two great black-backs. Then there are the two small species, the common
and the black-headed gull. These, when it comes to a general
scramble for the small fishes and other waste, are mere pickers-up of
unconsidered trifles on the outskirts of the whirlwind of wings, the
real fighting area, and their guttural cries--a familiar sound to
Londoners in winter--are drowned in the tempest of hard, piercing, and
grinding metallic noises emitted by the bigger birds.

All this noise and fury and scurry of wings of innumerable white forms,
mixed up with boats and busy shouting men, comes to be regarded by the
people concerned as a necessary part of the whole business, and the
bigger the bird crowd and the louder the uproar the better they appear
to like it. For their gulls are very dear to them.

[Illustration: 8037]

One morning when looking on and enjoying the noisy scene, I saw one of
the smaller boats left unattended by the men.

They had thrown a canvas over the fish, but this the gulls soon
succeeded in pulling aside; then those overhead converging poured down
in the form of a white column, and the boat was covered from stem to
stern with a mass of birds madly fighting for the herrings. The men
in other boats close by looked on and laughed; by and by they began
shouting, but this had no effect, and the struggling and feasting went
on until the master of the boat returned and scared them off. He said
afterwards that they had devoured half his catch, yet the men who had
been standing by looking on had made no real attempt to save the fish.

The gulls know their friends very well; with the man in sea-boots and
oilskins they are tamer than any domestic bird; they will take food from
his hands and love to settle to rest on the boats and to sit perched
like swallows on the mast top. They have not the same confidence towards
strangers, and they positively dislike small boys. When boys appear they
fly away to a distance. One evening, the men being out of sight, I found
three urchins amusing themselves by throwing stones at a few small gulls
flying about the sand in search of scraps. "What would you get," I asked
them, "if one of the men caught you stoning the gulls?" "Oh!" cried the
biggest of the three, drawing his head down between his shoulders in a
most expressive way, "we'd get our ears well cuffed."

"Very well," I said, "I'm here in their place to-day to look after the
birds." In a moment they dropped their stones and taking to their heels
vanished in a neighbouring court.

Yet these very boys in a few years' time, when they will be in the boats
too, will have the same feeling as the men, and be ready to inflict the
severest punishment on any youngster they may catch throwing a pebble at
one of their sacred birds!

[Illustration: 0039]

One day I caught sight of a large ivory-white gull of an unknown species
sitting on the water some distance from the shore, and was very anxious
to see more of this bird. Two or three days later I was with an artist
friend in his studio, and was standing at the window which looks upon
a sandy cove at the back of the town. By and by a wave of the incoming
tide threw up a dead dogfish about three feet long on the white sand
within fifty yards of the window. Scarcely was the fish left by the
retiring water before a big white-winged gull dropped down upon it--the
very bird I had been hoping to encounter again! There it remained,
trying to tear a hole in the tough skin, fully five minutes before
the returning water took the fish away, so that I had a good chance of
examining it through a binocular. It was considerably bigger than the
herring gull, with a much more formidable beak and altogether a bolder
appearance, and the entire plumage was of a chalky white. It was a
Glaucous gull--the famous Burgomaster of the Arctic Sea, probably a
female in immature plumage. In a few moments other gulls dropped down
to get a bite--three herring and one black-backed gull with some smaller
gulls--but they were not allowed to taste the fish. When one attempted
to come near it the white gull looked fixedly at him a couple of
moments, then drawing in its head suddenly tipped its beak upwards--an
expressive gull gesture corresponding to the snarl of a dog when he is
feeding and other dogs approach him. It produced a marked effect on the
other gulls; perhaps the Burgomaster, a rare visitor to our seas, was
known, from hearsay, to them as a great tyrant.

Talking of this noble stranger to one of the fishermen, I remarked that
if a bird collector happened to be about he would certainly have that
bird even if compelled to fire into the whole crowd of gulls to kill it.
"Then," he returned, "perhaps our men would kill him!"

The curious point is that this feeling should exist and be so strong
in a people who have little or no regard for birds generally. The most
religious of men, they are at the same time the least humane. The gull
they tell you is the fisherman's friend; but other sea-birds, which he
kills without compunction--the gannet, for instance--are useful to
him in the same way as the gull. They also say that the gulls keep the
harbour sweet and clean; an explanation probably invented for them by
some stranger within their gates. The fact is, they cherish an affection
for the gulls, though they refuse to confess it, and, being what they
are by race, this feeling has acquired the character of a superstition.
To injure a gull wilfully is to invite disaster. It may be that the
origin of the feeling is simply the fact that gulls gather in vociferous
crowds round the boats and in the harbour when the fishing has
prospered, and in this way become associated in the fisherman's mind
with all those agreeable ideas or images and emotions connected with a
good catch--smiles and cheerful words of greeting in the home, with food
in abundance, money for the rent and for needed clothes and other good
things for the little ones.

On the other hand we may have here a survival of an older superstition,
a notion that gulls are in some degree supernatural beings, perhaps
drowned mariners and fishermen returned in bird forms to haunt their
ancient homes and associate with their human fellow-creatures. The
feeling is certainly very strong: I was told that some of the fishermen
even in their times of greatest scarcity will always manage at mealtime
to put a few crusts and scraps of food into their pockets to throw to
the gulls in the harbour.

[Illustration: 0043]

From all this it might appear that the gulls at St. Ives are having an
exceedingly good time, but they are not wholly happy--not happy every
day, as they very soon let me know. The fishermen, like the Cornish
people generally, are strict Sabbatarians, and from Friday night or
Saturday morning, when the boats come in, they do not go out again until
the following Monday evening. In a neighbouring fishing village the
boats are taken out at the stroke of twelve on Sunday night. The St.
Ives men do not like to run it so fine, and the gulls are never able
to understand this long break in the fishing. On the Saturday, after
feeding, they retire to the sea and the rocks, where they pass the
day comfortably enough, sitting with beaks to the wind and digesting a
plentiful meal. On Sunday morning they congregate in the harbour with
empty stomachs only to find the boats lying empty and idle and all the
men away; they do not like it, but they put up with it, and by and by
loiter off to pick up what they can for themselves, or to wait patiently
on the sea and the rocks, through another long twenty-four hours. On
Monday morning they are very hungry indeed, and come in with stomachs
that scream for food. They come in their thousands, and still nothing
for them--the boats lying empty and idle, the men still at home in bed
and no movement in the harbour! They cannot and they will not endure it.
Then begins a tremendous demonstration of the unemployed. On my first
Monday I was roused from slumber before daylight by the uproar. It
was not now that tempest and tangle of broken, squealing and grinding
metallic noises emitted by the big gulls when they are in numbers
fighting over their food, it was the loud long wailing call of the bird,
incessantly repeated, a thousand wailing like one, and at intervals the
dreary laughter-like chorus of short reiterated cries; then again the
insistent wailing calls. When it became light they could be seen as a
white cloud hanging over the harbour, the birds moving round and round
over the idle boats in endless procession, and this went on for about an
hour, when, finding that nothing came of it all, they went sadly away.

On yet another morning I was awakened before daylight, but this was a
happy occasion, the boats having come in during the small hours laden
with the biggest catch of the season. The noise of the birds made me get
up and dress in a hurry to go and find out what it was all about. For an
hour and a half I stood at the end of the little stone pier watching the
cloud and whirlwind of vociferous birds, and should have remained longer
but for a singular accident--a little gull tragedy--which brought
a sudden end to the feast. The men in fifty boats while occupied in
disengaging the fish from the nets were continually throwing the small
useless fishes away, and these, falling all round in the water, brought
down a perpetual rush and rain of gulls from overhead; everywhere they
were frantically struggling on the water, while every bird rising with
a fish in his beak was instantly swooped down upon and chased by the
others. Now one of the excited birds while rushing down by chance struck
a rope or spar and fell into the water at the side of a boat, about
forty yards from where I was standing. It was a herring gull in mature
plumage, and its wing was broken. The bird could not understand this; it
made frantic efforts to rise, but the whole force exerted being in one
wing merely caused it to spin rapidly round and round. These struggles
eventually caused the shattered bone to break through the skin; the
blood began to flow and redden the plumage on one side. This was again
and again washed off in the succeeding struggles to rise, but every time
a pause came the feathers were reddened afresh. At length the poor thing
became convinced that it could no longer fly, that it could only swim,
and at once ceasing to struggle it swam away from the boats and
out towards the open bay. Hardly had it gone a dozen yards from the
boat-side where it had fallen before some of the gulls flying near
observed it for the first time, and dropping to within three or four
yards of the surface hovered over it. Then a strange thing happened.
Instantly, as if a shot had been fired to silence them, the uproar in
the harbour ceased; the hundreds of gulls fighting on the water rose up
simultaneously to join the cloud of birds above, and the whole concourse
moved silently away in one direction, forming a dense crowd above the
wounded bird. In this formation, suspended at a height of about thirty
yards over and moving with him, they travelled slowly out into the
middle of the bay.

The silence and stillness in the harbour seemed strange after that
tempest of noise and motion, for not a bird had remained behind, nor did
one return for at least half an hour; then in small companies they began
to straggle back to resume the interrupted feast.

[Illustration: 0047]




CHAPTER III CORNWALL'S CONNEMARA

_Aspect of the country--Gilpin on Cornish scenery--The
farm-houses--Footpaths and stiles--Cattle and pigs--A friendly sow--Dogs
and foxes--Stony fields--Farmers' love of their holdings--An old
farmer._

|THE coast country at the end or the western extremity of Cornwall
presents an aspect wild and rough as any spot in England. The
eighty-miles-long county, which some one compares to a malformed knobbly
human leg in shape, narrows down near its termination to a neck or ankle
of land no more than six or seven miles wide, with St. Ives Bay on one
(the north) side, and Mount's Bay on the other, with its group of places
of famous or familiar names--Mousehole, Newlyn, Penzance, Marazion and
St. Michael's Mount. Then the land broadens again, forming that rounded
bit of country, the westernmost part of England, containing seventy-five
or eighty square miles of hilly and moorland country, in great part
treeless, with a coastline, from bay to bay, of about thirty miles.
Following the coast, one does not wish them more: the most enthusiastic
lover of an incult nature, who delights in forcing his way over rocky
barriers and through thickets of furze, bogs and rills innumerable, will
find these thirty miles as satisfying as any sixty elsewhere. And the
roughest, therefore most exhilarating, portion of the coast is that
between St. Ives and Land's End, a distance of about twenty miles. This
strip of country has been called the Connemara of Cornwall. William
Gilpin, that grand old seeker after the picturesque at the end of the
eighteenth century, once journeyed into Cornwall, but got no further
than Bodmin, as he saw nothing but "a barren and naked country, in all
respects as uninteresting as can well be conceived," and he was informed
that west of Bodmin it was no better. It is, indeed, worse, and one
wonders what his feelings would have been had he persevered to the very
end--to rough "Connemara" and flat, naked Bolerium! His strictures
on the scenery would have amused the present generation. For all
that repelled Gilpin and those of his time in nature, the barren or
"undecorated," as he would say, the harsh and savage and unsuited to
human beings, now most attracts us. And of all places inhabited by man
this coast country is the most desert-like and desolate in appearance.
The black, frowning, wave-beaten cliffs on the one hand, the hills and
moors on the other, treeless, strewn abundantly with granite boulders,
rough with heath and furze and bracken, the summits crowned with great
masses of rock resembling ancient ruined castles. Midway between the
hills and the sea, half a mile or so from the cliffs, are the farms, but
the small houses and walled fields on the inhabited strip hardly detract
from the rude and savage aspect of the country. Nature will be Nature
here, and man, like the other inhabitants of the wilderness, has adapted
himself to the conditions. The badgers have their earths, the foxes
their caverns in the rocks, and the linnet, yellow-hammer, and magpie
hide their nests, big and little, in the dense furze bushes: he in like
manner builds his dwelling small and low, sheltering as best he can in
any slight depression in the ground, or behind thickets of furze and
the rocks he piles up. The small naked stone farm-house, with its little
outbuildings, corn-stacks, and wood piles huddling round it, seem like
a little flock of goats drawn together for company and shelter in some
rough desert place on a cold windy day. Looking from a hill-top on one
of the small groups of buildings--and in some instances two or three
farms have clubbed their houses together for better protection from the
blast--they resemble toy houses, and you have the fancy that you could
go down and pick them up and put them in your pocket.

The coast road, running from village to village, winding much, now under
now over the hills, comes close to some of the farms and leaves others
at a distance; but all these little human centres are united by a
footpath across the fields.

[Illustration: 0050]

It is very pleasant to follow this slight track, this connecting thread,
which brings to mind Richard Carew's account of the poor Cornish farmers
of his time, three centuries ago, when he says that "amongst themselves
they agree well and company lovingly together." I recall, too, that some
social rodents, that live in communities, in collections of burrows or
villages, have a track of that kind leading from village to village,
worn by the feet of the little animals in visiting their neighbours. The
fields being small you have innumerable stiles to cross in a five or a
ten miles walk; but they do not want climbing, as they are very nearly
all of that Cornish type made with half a dozen or more large slabs
of granite placed gridiron-wise almost flush with the ground. You step
easily over the stones: but the cattle do not follow, since, owing to
their inability to see just where their feet will be set, their legs
would come down between the slabs.

Cows are in most of the fields, the dairy being the main thing in these
farms; and next to the small Jersey-like cow, the native breed, the pig
ranks in importance. It is pleasant to see the pigs in these parts, as
they are allowed more liberty in the fields and about the house than
they usually get in other places; or, indeed, anywhere on this side of
St. George's Channel. If not "the gintleman that pays the rint," the pig
contributes a good deal towards it, and short of liberty to walk in
at the front door and take his place in the family circle he has every
consideration paid him. On going up to a farm-house one is sometimes
obliged to get round or step over a pig lying comfortably in the path.
One day, going to call on some friends who had taken lodgings at a small
farm, I found a portly sow lying in the way a dozen yards or so from the
front door. My friends were getting ready for a walk, and when we came
out the sow got up and, placing herself at the side of the lady, set out
with us. We all tried our best to turn her back, shouting indignantly at
her and pushing her away with our sticks and boots, but all in vain--she
would come. "I'm to blame," said the lady. "When we first came we had
tea out of doors, and when this pig came up to look at us I foolishly
gave her a slice of bread and butter and spoke kindly to her, and now
I can't get away from her. I give her nothing, and I try to escape her
attention, but she watches the door, and when she sees me with my things
on she insists on keeping with me even if I walk miles. It is most
inconvenient." It certainly was, and we carefully avoided the village
for fear of remarks. Fowls, too, are reared in numbers, and it is a
great grievance of the farmers that foxes must be religiously preserved
along this coast where they cannot be hunted. Here, again, I am reminded
of Carew's _Survey of Cornwall,_ in which he writes: "The fox planteth
his dwelling in the steep cliffs of the seaside, where he possesseth
holds, so many in number, so dangerous of access, and so full of
windings, as in a manner it falleth out a matter impossible to disseize
him of his ancient inheritance." He still keeps it, and after three
centuries is more secure in it than ever, since there is now no stronger
law than this unwritten one which gives immunity to the fox.

As a rule, several dogs are kept on the farm; but he cares little for
them. His fastness is close by in the cliffs, and between it and the
farm there is a wilderness of furze bushes and stone fences, the ins and
outs of which he knows better than the dogs. They cannot come near him.
At one place the farmer's wife told me the foxes came about the house
almost every night and started barking, whereupon the dogs barked in
reply, and this would go on, bark fox, bark dog, by the hour, keeping
them awake, until at last the dogs, tired of the useless contest, would
go to sleep; then the foxes would sneak in to see what they could pick
up.

There is very little cultivation--hardly more than is required for the
use of the farm, and in many fields even this little is carried on under
difficulties on account of the stones. The stones are taken out and
piled on to the walls or hedges at the side, and though this process
has been going on for centuries many boulders and huge blocks of granite
still remain in the little fields. I was amused one day at the sight of
a field of only about two acres on which I counted 135 stones appearing
like huge mushrooms and toadstools over the ground. Corn had been grown
on it, and I asked the farmer how it was managed. He answered that he
would laugh to see a man and horses from any other part of the country
try to cultivate that field and others like it. Here the men are used to
it, and horses know their part so well that if the share touches a stone
they stop instantly and wait for the ploughman's word to move on.

This same farmer told me that one day last summer a lady visitor staying
in the neighbourhood came to where he was doing some work and burst
out in praise of the place, and told him she envied him his home in
the dearest, sweetest, loveliest spot on earth. "That's what you think,
ma'am," he returned, "because you're here for a week or two in summer
when it's fine and the heath in bloom. Now I think it's the poorest,
ugliest, horriblest place in the whole world, because I've got to live
in it and get my living out of it."

They certainly have to work hard to make the per acre they have to
pay for their stony fields. But they are a tough, industrious, frugal
people, in many instances little removed from peasants in their way of
living, and are strongly attached to their rude homes and rough country.
If you tell them that their lot is exceedingly hard, that they pay
too high a rent, and so on, enumerating all the drawbacks, they assent
eagerly, and will put in many little touches to make the picture darker;
but if you then advise them to throw up their farms and migrate to some
place you can name, in the Midlands say, where they will pay less for
better land, and be out of the everlasting wind which tears every green
leaf to shreds and makes their lives a perpetual discomfort, they shake
their heads. They cannot endure the thought of leaving their homes. It
is only the all but complete ruin of the tin-mining industry that has
sent so many Cornishmen into exile in distant lands. But these wanderers
are always thinking of home and come back when they can. One meets
them every day, young and middle-aged men, back from Africa, Australia,
America; not to settle down, since there is nothing for them to do--not
just yet at all events; but because they have saved a little and can
afford to take that long journey for the joy of seeing the dear old
faces again, and the dear familiar land which proved so uninteresting to
the reverend author of _Forest Scenery_.

But farming, unlike the mining and fishing industries, cannot fail
utterly, and so long as a living can be made out of it these men will
stick to their farms.

One brilliant spring-like day in midwinter I came upon an old man on the
footpath at some distance from the nearest house, painfully walking to
and fro on a clean piece of ground with the aid of two sticks. An old
farmer, past work, I thought. His appearance greatly attracted me, for
though his bent shrunken legs could hardly support him, he had a fine
head and a broad, deep, powerful-looking chest. His face was of that
intensely Irish type so common in West Cornwall, but more shapely, more
noble, with a look of strength and resolution not at all common.

Seeing that he was old I supposed he was deaf, and shouted my "Good
day," and the remark that it was a very fine day. But there was no need
to shout, his senses were very good. "Good day to you," he returned,
his stone-grey stern eyes fixed on my face. "Yes, it is a fine day
indeed--very, very fine. And no frost, no cold at all, and the winter
going on, going on. We are getting on very well indeed." And to this
subject he kept in spite of my attempts to lead the talk to something
else. The lovely weather, the extraordinary mildness of the season, the
comfort of a winter with no frost or cold at all--to that he would come
back. And at length, when I said good-bye and left him, the last words
I heard him say were, "Yes, the winter is going--very freely, very
freely."

For he was old--his age was eighty-seven; he had come to that time of
life when the weather becomes strangely important to a man, when winter
is a season of apprehension; when he remembers that the days of our age
are three-score years and ten, and though men be so strong that they
come to four-score years, yet is their strength then but labour and
sorrow, so soon passeth it away. I was told that he had farmed the land
where I found him taking his constitutional since he was a young man;
that some months ago, on account of his infirmities, he had handed
the farm over to one of his sons, and that he was still able to help a
little in the work. His arms were strong still, and once up on the seat
he could drive a cart or trap or reaping machine as well as any one.

He was but one of several grey old men I met with on the farms, and it
seemed to me that they were something like their neighbour the badger,
that they are as tenacious of their dreary-looking little homesteads and
stony fields as that tough beast is of his earth among the rocks.

[Illustration: 0057]




CHAPTER IV OLD CORNISH HEDGES

_Hedges in England--Plant and animal life--Stone hedges in
Cornwall--Effect of wind on trees--How hedges are made--Appearance of
stone hedges--An ancient hedge--Woody ivy--Signs of antiquity--An old
man's testimony._

|EVERY one in England knows what a hedge is--a row of thorn or other
hardy bushes originally planted to protect a field, which, when old
and unkept, has the appearance and character of a brake or thicket. It
consequently comes as a surprise when we first visit the remote and most
un-English county of Cornwall to discover that a hedge there may mean
something quite different. It puzzled me to read in a book on Cornwall
that in some exceedingly rough places near the coast one found it easier
to make one's way over the ground by climbing on to a hedge and walking
along its top.

The oldest, toughest, closest and most evenly-cut hedge one knows would
hardly afford a safe footing for a man; and as to attempting to get upon
or walk on a big unkept hedge, such as are common in the south and west
counties on this side the Tamar, the very thought of it is painful.
In imagination one sees, and seeing feels, oneself stuck fast in a big
bramble bush. In Cornwall I discovered that a stone wall was called a
hedge--the sort of wall which in Scotland I had been taught to call
a dyke. I did not like it so well as the English hedge, that
wild disordered tangle of all the most beautiful plants in these
islands--black and white thorn; privet with its small grape-like
clusters; yew and holly and ivy with late, honeyed blossoms for bees and
wasps and hornets; and briar and sweet-briar, bramble and briony; also
poisonous black briony and traveller's-joy, a green and silver tapestry;
and wayfaring tree, spindle-wood and cornel, with scarlet, purple and
orange-coloured berries; and dark deadly-nightshade, pushing its slender
stems up through the interlaced branches--all massed together for common
protection like a packed herd of wild swine on their defence in some
savage solitude, displaying bristling backs and bared gnashing tushes to
a hostile world.

They are--these wildings of the hedge--the counterparts in the vegetable
world of the creatures called "vermin" in the animal kingdom. In the
recesses of their thorny intertwining boughs, and deep down among their
tough ancient roots, the vermin, the banned ones, have their home and
refuge--the quaint hedgehog and minute long-nosed shrew; black and white
magpie and chacking, tail-shaking butcher-bird; adder and snake and
slow-worm; blood-sucking stoat and weasel with flat heads and serpentine
bodies, and their small quarry, rats and voles and pretty sharpnosed
wood-mice with leaf-like ear, and winter sleeping dormice.

It was fortunate that in the long ago, when our progenitors began to
take plots of ground for cultivation and pasture, they found out this
cheap ready way of marking their boundaries and safeguarding their
cattle and corn. We may say they planted better than they knew: they
planted once, and many and many a hedge--unnumbered miles and leagues of
hedges--that are now great belts of thicket, were first planted by man
in the remote past. Nature took over the thin row of thorn seedlings
and made it what it is, not only the useful thing it was intended for--a
natural barbed-wire entanglement--but a thing of beauty and a joy for
ever.

In West Cornwall, where I first came to know the native hedge, they
cannot have these belts of thicket, rich in a varied plant and animal
life. It is a country of moors and rugged stony hills where nothing
flourishes but heath and furze and bracken. The farming folk have
succeeded in long time in creating small arable and grass fields in the
midst of this desolation, but they cannot grow trees on account of the
violent winds charged with salt moisture that blow incessantly from the
Atlantic. If the farmer plants a few trees so that he may one day eat
an apple of his own growing and sit in the shade, he must build a wall
eight or ten feet high to protect them from the salt blast, and he may
then die of old age before the apple is ripe or the shade created. Nor
can he grow a hedge: the furze, it is true, abounds everywhere, but it
is a most intractable plant that will go (or grow) its own wild way, and
no man has yet subdued it to his will and made it serve as a hedge. Yet
even in this wind-vexed land a few self-planted trees may be seen.

You find them in the strip of farm country between the hills and sea,
in hollows and under high banks, or where a mass of rock affords them
shelter; and they are mostly hawthorns and blackthorns with a few hardy
bush-like trees of other kinds. They are like the trees and bushes on
the most exposed coasts in Yorkshire and in other places, growing all
one way, lying close to and sometimes actually on the ground, stretching
out their branches and every twig towards the inland country. The sight
of these wind-tormented, one-sided trees fascinates me and I stay long
to look at them.

                        A bristled tree

               With branches cedared by the salten gale,

                   Stretched back, as if with wings that cannot flee,

is how Gordon Hake describes the appearance, seeing, as I do, the desire
and struggle to escape--to fly from that pitiless persecution. But the
"wings" I do not see: in summer the foliage is to my sight but a ragged
mantle; in winter the human expression is strongest and most pathetic.
Held by the feet in the grip of earth, the beaten bush strains to get
away; it suggests the figure of a person crawling, or trying to crawl,
the knee-like joints on the ground, the body-like trunk thrown forward,
the long bare branches and terminal twigs, like the brown, thin naked
arms and claw-like opened fingers of a starving scourged slave in the
tropics, extended imploringly towards the land.

This being the nature of the country the farmer can but hedge his land
and fields with stone: he is in a measure compelled to do so, since the
earth is full of it and the land strewn with boulders; to make a field
he must remove it and bestow it somewhere. Now after centuries of this
process of removing and piling up stones, the farm land has become
covered over with a network of these enduring hedges, or fences,
intersecting each other at all angles; and viewed from a hill-top the
country has the appearance of a patched quilt made of pieces of all
sizes and every possible shape, and of all shades of green from darkest
gorse to the delicate and vivid greens of the young winter grass.

That half-reclaimed district, especially the strip of coast from St.
Ives Bay to Cape Cornwall, was a good winter hunting ground, and I spent
many weeks in ranging about the fields and waste or incult places among
them. Here you can wander at will, without fear of hurting the farmer's
feelings, as in Devonshire, by walking on his land. The cultivation is
little, the fields being mostly grass: the small farm-house is out of
sight somewhere behind the stone hedges; it is rare to meet with a human
being, and the few cows or calves you occasionally come across follow
you about as if only too pleased to have a visitor. Climbing over the
next hedge into the next field you find nobody there but a pig who
stares at you, then welcomes you with a good-humoured grunt; or an old
solitary plough-horse; or no semi-human domestic creature at all, only
a crowd of busy starlings; or starlings mixed with daws, field-fares,
missel-thrushes and a few wagtails; or a couple of magpies, or a small
flock of wintering curlews to be found day after day on the same spot.
After crossing two or three such fields you come upon an unreclaimed
patch, or belt, where grey-lichened rocks are mixed with masses of old
furze bushes, and heath and tussocks of pale brome-grass. A lonely,
silent, peaceful place, where, albeit a habitation of man for untold
centuries, it is wild Nature still.

Here, with eyes and mind occupied with the bird, I did not at first pay
much attention to the hedges: I simply got over them, or, in thorny and
boggy places, walked on them, but eventually they began to exercise an
attraction, and I began to recognise that these, too, like the planted
hedges of other districts, were man's creation but in part, since Nature
had added much to make them what they are. Human hands first raised
them: the process is going on all the time; the labourer, the cow-boy,
the farmer himself, when there is nothing else to do, goes out and piles
up stones to stop a gap the cattle have made, to add to the height or
length of an old hedge, and so on, but the wall once made is taken over
by Nature as in the case of the planted hedge. She softens and darkens
the crude harsh surface, clothes it in grey and yellow lichens and
cushioned green moss, and decorates it with everything that will grow on
it, before the time comes for her to ruin and finally to obliterate. But
what time is needed here for demolition with such a material as granite
to work on, where there are no trees to insinuate their roots into the
crevices, slowly to expand the pliant fibres into huge woody wedges
to thrust the loose stones apart and finally to pull them down! We
can imagine how slow the destructive processes are when we look at
innumerable Cornish crosses scattered over the county, showing clearly
the lines cut on them in the early days of Christianity in this
district. Still more do we see it in the ancient sacred stones--the
cromlechs, coits, hurlers and holed stones, moor-stones or "merry
maidens," and many others--which have stood and resisted the
disintegrating effect of the weather since prehistoric times. The wall
built is practically everlasting, but Nature works slowly on it, and the
hedges I had about me differed greatly on this account, from the rude
walls raised but yesterday or a dozen or twenty years ago to those which
must have stood for centuries or for a thousand years or longer. Indeed,
it was the appearance of extreme antiquity in one of these hedges, which
I often crossed and sometimes walked on, which first excited my interest
in the subject. It looked, and probably is, older than the walls of
Silchester, which date back 1700 or 1800 years, and are now being
gradually pulled down by the trees that have grown upon them. It was the
longest of the old hedges I found, beginning among the masses of
granite on the edge of the cliff, and winding away inland to lose itself
eventually among the rocks and gullies and furze-thickets at the foot
of a great boulder-strewn hill. Its sinuosity struck me as a mark of
extreme age, as in this it resembled the huge prehistoric walls or
earthworks made of chalk on the downs in Southern England, which meander
in an extraordinary way. It was also larger than the other hedges, which
crossed its winding course at all angles, being in most parts six to
seven feet high, and exceedingly broad; moreover, where the stones could
be seen they appeared to be more closely fitted together than in other
hedges. Most of the stonework was, however, pretty well covered over,
in some places with a very thick turf, in others by furze and bracken,
rooted in the crevices and in places hiding the wall in a dense thicket.

But of all the plants growing on it the ivy was most remarkable. It is
not a plant that flourishes in this district, where it has as hard a
struggle as any tree to maintain its existence. It is found only in
sheltered situations on this coast, in the villages, and on the landward
side of steep banks and large masses of rock. On this old wall there
was really no shelter, since the furious blasts from the sea swept
both sides of it with the same violence. Yet in places the ivy had got
possession of it, but it was an ivy very much altered in character by
the unfavourable conditions from that greenest luxuriant plant we know
so well. In place of the dark mass of foliage, the leaves were few and
small and far apart, so that viewing the wall from a little distance
away you would not notice that it had any ivy growing on it, but would
see that the more naked portions were covered with a growth of rope-like
stems.

[Illustration: 0065]

The wonder is that with so few leaves it can grow so much wood! The
stems, which are not thick, are smooth and of a pale grey colour and
grow in and out of the crevices, and cross and recross one another,
fitting into all the inequalities of the stony surface and in places
where they cover the wall looking like a numerous brood or tangle of
grey serpents.

This snaky appearance of the almost leafless old wall-ivy fascinated me,
and I went often to look at it on the same spot and was never tired of
the sight.

It struck me as curious that the woody ivy should have this aspect,
since the wall itself in some parts distinctly suggested the serpentine
form and appearance. Here again I was reminded of some of the long
earthworks or walls on the Wiltshire and Dorsetshire downs--the rounded,
thickly turfed bank which winds serpent-like over the hills and across
the valleys, and which often has a green colour differing slightly from
that of the earth it lies across.

The old Cornish hedge had this aspect in places where it was clothed
with turf, and, viewed from a distance and seen winding about in
great curves across the rough brown heath and furze-grown earth, the
serpentine appearance was very marked.

Whether or not the Cornish antiquaries have paid any attention to these
ancient hedges I do not know. The only native I came across who had
anything to say about them was a peasant farmer whose acquaintance
I made at his cottage-like farm, a few miles from the hedge I have
described. He was a man of seventy-nine but vigorous still and of a
lively mind. When I spoke to him about the old hedge and its ancient
appearance, he said he had known it all his life; that he was a native
of a small hamlet close to the hedge, and at the age of seven, when he
first took to birds'-nesting, he used to hunt along it on every summer
day and came to know it as well as he knew the fence round his garden
and the walls of the cottage he lived in. It had not, he assured me,
changed in the least during the last seventy or seventy-two years: it
was to-day exactly what it was in his early boyhood, with thick turf and
furze and bracken and woody ivy covering it in the same way in the same
old places. This made him think it must be very, very old.

It seemed to me that his life, although a long one, was but a short
period to measure by in such a case, that if he could have consulted his
father and grandfather and his remoter ancestors back to the time when
the last Cornish king was cast out by William the Bastard, they would
all have given the same testimony and said that the hedge was very old
when they knew it.

[Illustration: 0068]




CHAPTER V BOLERIUM: THE END OF ALL THE LAND

_Cliff scenery and headlands--The Land's End sentiment--Pilgrims and
how they are affected--Wilkie Collins--The child's vision--Books on
Cornwall--A Trip to the Far West--Sir Humphry Davy--Wesley--Winter
nights at the Land's End--Lighthouses--Associations and
speculations--The scene of great tragedies in the past._

|EVERY day, even in winter, if the weather be not too bad, but chiefly
during the nine months from March to November, pilgrims come to this
wind-swept, wave-beaten point to gaze and set their feet upon the little
rocky promontory of the Land's End. It is less bold and impressive
than many others of the hundred headlands at this western extremity of
England between St. Ives and Mount's Bay. From this or that projecting
point, commanding a view of the coastline for some distance, one
may count a dozen or more of these headlands thrust out aslant like
stupendous half-ruined buttresses supporting the granite walls of the
cliff. They are of a sullen brown colour and rough harsh aspect, and in
places have the appearance of being built up of huge square blocks
of granite, and at other points they form stacks of columns as at
the Giant's Causeway. The summits of these headlands are often high,
resembling ruinous castles placed on projecting points of the cliff;
they are confused masses of rocks of many shapes, piled loosely one upon
the other, their exposed surfaces clothed over with long coarse grey
lichen. Large gulls, daws and cormorants sit or stand here and there
on the ledges and prominent points, the herring gulls clamorous at the
sight of a human form; the restive daws quitting their stands to wheel
about at intervals, rising and falling, soon to settle down again; the
cormorants silent and motionless, standing erect with curved, snaky
necks, like birds carved in ebony.

Stealing quietly among these hoary masses of rock you may see a very
wild rabbit, and on a bright, still, winter day, if you are singularly
fortunate, you may catch sight of a beast better worth seeing, a cliff
fox, lying fast asleep or lightly dozing, stretched at full length on
a ledge, looking intensely red in the sunshine, and very conspicuous
against the hoary lichened rock. This is his home and castle, which
he shares with the rabbits that know his ways, and the birds that are
always just out of his reach. Thus do they live together in one house
like one antagonistic family in a strange artificial harmony, and do
not mix, but come and go and move about freely, and bask in the warm
sunshine, and sit up to rub their long ears and whiskers, and spread out
their wings to dry, and preen their feathers. Peace and quiet in their
castle, while the great waves roll in to beat on its caverned walls
beneath, making the earth tremble with their measured blows, covering
the black rocks with dazzling white foam, and sending up a mist of spray
to the summit.

At intervals between Bay and Bay, a distance of thirty miles, you come
upon headlands of this type--Cape Cornwall, Gurnard's Head, Zennor
Cliffs and others, to the north of Land's End, while just south of
it you have the noblest rock scenery of this coast, including the
stupendous cliffs of Tol-Pedn-Penwith and Treryn Dinas, with its famed
Logan Stone. Bolerium itself, the narrow promontory of piled rocks of
the Land's End and the flat bit of country adjoining it is, sentiment
apart, one of the least interesting points on the coast.

But the sentiment is a very great thing and interesting to observe. And
this is easy, since the pilgrims mostly come by way of Penzance, distant
about a dozen miles, travelling in batches of twenty-five or thirty or
more, packed closely in some public conveyance; so that one has but to
join the crowd and, sitting among them, watch their faces out of the
corners of his eyes. They are a mixed company of men and women of all
conditions, from all parts of the country, with some Americans and
Colonials. It is indeed curious to see an identical feeling on faces so
unlike, from the very young who do not try to conceal it, to the very
aged and almost worn-out globe wanderers, who are now nearly at the end
of their life's pilgrimage, and have seen pretty well all that was worth
seeing on this wide earth except this one famous spot which by chance
has been left to the last.

[Illustration: 0071]

And by and by, after travelling half a dozen miles, they find themselves
in a land unlike any place they know; inhabited, for there are a few
small sad-looking granite cottages and farms and hamlets, but of a rude
and desolate aspect, and therefore in harmony with their emotions and
preconceived ideas about the place. It is a treeless barren country,
hill and moor, with furze and brown heath interspersed with grey boulder
stones, the whole dominated by the great desolate hill of Chapel Carn
Brea. The travellers look out, straining their eyes to see the end; but
before that comes the hilly country is left behind, and at the last it
is flat and tame with a sad-looking granite-built village and the grey
sea beyond. One has watched the bright eager look that expected so much
fade out of the various faces; and by the time the pilgrims get down to
scatter along the cliff or to go at once to their luncheon at the hotel
it is pretty well all gone. And if you go back to Penzance to join the
next lot, and then again, and every day for a week or a month, you will
witness the same thing--the collection of unlike faces with the light
of the same feeling in the eyes of all, increasing as they advance
over that rude moorland country and fading out at the end to that blank
look--"Is this the Land's End--is this all!"

What, then, did they expect? Wilkie Collins best answers that question
in his pleasant book of rambles written more than half a century ago,
when he says that the Land's End is to Cornwall what Jerusalem is to the
Holy Land, the great and final object of a journey to the westernmost
county of England, its Ultima Thule, where it ceases; a name that
strikes us most in childhood when we learnt our geography; which fills
the minds of imaginative people with visions of barrenness and solitude
and dreams of some lonely promontory, the place where the last man in
England will be found waiting for death at the end of the world.

That is indeed the secret of the visitor's expectant feeling and
disappointment--the vague vision of a vastness and grandeur and
desolateness almost preternatural, conceived in childhood, which all
the experience of a long life of disillusionment has been powerless to
eradicate from the mind, or to replace with a mental picture more in
accord with the reality.

But if this disillusionment is plainly visible to an observer on the
faces of many visitors, the books about Cornwall tell a different story;
their writers would have us believe that the reality has surpassed their
expectations, that their emotions of admiration and astonishment have
been deeply moved. When I had been some time in Cornwall and it had
taken hold of me, I sat myself down before a formidable array of
books descriptive of the duchy, only to find that reading them was
an exceedingly wearisome task. By and by I discovered something to
entertain and keep me going; this was the grand business of describing
the Land's End in a suitable manner, but more or less rhetorically and
charged with exalted feeling, which was undertaken in turn by every
visitor. This made many a dull book amusing. I experienced a kind of
sporting interest in the literary traveller's progress through the
county, and looked eagerly forward to his arrival at the famous
spot where he would have to pull himself together and launch himself
bird-like from the cliffs, as it were, on the void sublime. There was
great variety in these utterances, but I think the one that diverted me
most was in a book entitled _A Trip to the Far West_, published in 1840,
as the author, one Baker Peter Smith, was evidently an experimenter in
words, some of his own making; or we might call him an Early Victorian
young man in search of a style.

"I reached the Land's End," he wrote, "and sat down on a protuberant
block of granite, close to the precipice, overhanging the multitangular
rocks which form an impenetrable barrier against the raging tides of the
mighty waters." After lamenting that he had so little time in which to
survey the "multicapsular curiosities of the region," he proceeds: "The
local sublimity of the Land's End affords a commanding view of scenick
expanse; and the colossal columns of rock give an awful effect to
the stupendous vision; whilst, added to these grave and elevating
sentiments, consequent on so grand a sight, the sense of hearing also
acts upon the mind: by the distant roar of the angry sea, ascending from
the caverns below, and the screaming of the Cornish chough assailing
you from above and every side," and so on. He concludes:--"The entranced
spectator has no election, but is engrossed with admiration of that
Great Power by the fiat of whose mere volition nature's chaos was thus
harmonized and stamped with the glorifying impress of multiplicious
beauty."

One is glad that cormorant, book-devouring Time, has spared us Baker
Peter Smith.

But there are a few noble passages to be found as well, and I think
this one of Humphry Davy, written in youth before the flower of poesy
withered in him, pleases me the best:

                        On the sea

               The sunbeams tremble and the purple light

               Illumes the dark Bolerium, seat of storms!

               Dear are his granite wilds, his schistine rocks

               Encircled by the waves, where to the gale

               The haggard cormorant shrieks, and, far beyond

               Where the great ocean mingles with the sky,

               Behold the cloud-like islands, grey in mist.

Another notable utterance was that of John Wesley, when on a Sunday in
September, 1743, after preaching to the people at Sennen, he went down
to look at the Land's End. "It was an awful sight," he wrote. "But how
will this melt away when God ariseth in judgment! The sea beneath doth
indeed boil like a pot. One would think the deep to be hoary. But though
they swell yet can they not prevail. He shall set their bounds which
they cannot pass."

There spoke the founder of Methodism, saturated in Biblical phraseology
until it gushed spontaneously from him even as its song or cry from
a bird. He had forgotten his own language, as it were, and even in an
exalted moment in this grey north land could only express himself in
these old Asiatic figures of speech.

To return from this digression. Although the vague image of an imagined
Land's End fades from the mind and is perhaps lost when the reality is
known, the ancient associations of the place remain, and, if a visit be
rightly timed, they may invest it with a sublimity and fascination not
its own. I loitered many days near that spot in midwinter, in the worst
possible weather, but even when pining for a change to blue skies and
genial sunshine I blessed the daily furious winds which served to keep
the pilgrims away, and to half blot out the vulgar modern buildings with
rain and mist from the Atlantic. At dark I would fight my way against
the wind to the cliff, and down by the sloping narrow neck of land
to the masses of loosely piled rocks at its extremity. It was a very
solitary place at that hour, where one feared not to be intruded on by
any other night-wanderer in human shape. The raving of the wind among
the rocks; the dark ocean--exceedingly dark except when the flying
clouds were broken and the stars shining in the clear spaces touched the
big black incoming waves with a steely grey light; the jagged isolated
rocks, on which so many ships have been shattered, rising in awful
blackness from the spectral foam that appeared and vanished and appeared
again; the multitudinous hoarse sounds of the sea, with throbbing and
hollow booming noises in the caverns beneath--all together served to
bring back something of the old vanished picture or vision of Bolerium
as we first imagine it.

[Illustration: 0071]

The glare from the various lighthouses visible at this point only
served to heighten the inexpressibly sombre effect, since shining from
a distance they made the gloomy world appear vaster. Down in the south,
twenty-five miles away, the low clouds were lit up at short intervals
by wide white flashes as of sheet lightning from the Lizard lights, the
most powerful of all lights, the reflection of which may be seen at a
distance of sixty or seventy miles at sea. In front of the Land's End
promontory, within five miles of it, was the angry red glare from the
Longships tower, and further away to the left the white revolving light
of the Wolf lighthouse.

It was perhaps on some tempestuous winter night at the Land's End that
the fancy, told as a legend or superstitious belief in J. H. Pearce's
_Cornish Drolls_, occurred to him or to some one, that the Wolf Rock was
the habitation of a great black dog, a terrible supernatural beast that
preys on the souls of the dead. For the rock lies directly in the route
of those who die on the mainland and journey over the sea to their
ultimate abode, the Scilly Isles: and when the wind blows hard against
them and they are beaten down like migrating birds and fly close to the
surface, he is able as they come over the rock to capture and devour
them.

During these vigils, when I was in a sense the "last man" in that most
solitary place, its associations, historical and mythical, exercised a
strange power over me. Here, because of its isolation, or remoteness,
from Saxon England, because it is the very end of the land, "the
westeste point of the land of Cornewalle," the ancient wild Spirit
of the people remained longest unchanged, and retained much of its
distinctive character down to within recent times. It was a Celtic
people with an Iberian strain, even as in Wales and Ireland and
Scotland. Now, either because of a different proportion of the dark
aboriginal blood, or of the infusion of Scandinavian and other racial
elements, or some other cause, these four Celtic families differ very
widely, as we know; but we think, or at all events are accustomed
to say, that they are an imaginative, a poetic people. Doubtless in
Cornwall this spirit was always weakest, since it never succeeded in
expressing itself in any permanent form; but albeit feeble it probably
did exist, and in this very district, this end of all the land, it must
have lingered longest. If this be so it is strange to think that it was
perhaps finally extinguished by the Wesley brothers--one with the poetry
of the Hebrews ever on his lips, the other with his own lyrical gift!

It may be said that in the middle of the eighteenth century the light
must have been so feeble that it would have soon expired of itself if
Methodism had not trampled out the last faint sparks; and it may also
be said that the Cornish people did not lose much, seeing that this root
had never flowered; that they had never sung and never said anything
worth remembering; while on the other hand their gain was a substantial
one, for though it imposed an ugly form of religion and ugly houses of
worship, it changed them (so the Methodists say) from brutality and
vice to what they are--a temperate, law-abiding people. But I shall have
something more to say on this subject in a later chapter.

Here among the rocks by night I think less of these moral changes,
and of other events within historical times, than of those which came
before, of which we have no certain knowledge. We can only assume that
in the successive invasions during the Bronze Age this was invariably
the last place conquered and last refuge of a beaten fugitive people.

I recall here a strange phenomenon in wild-bird life occasionally
witnessed in this district. Cornwall has a singularly mild and equable
climate, but great frosts do at long intervals invade it and reach to
the very extremity of the land: and when a cold wave, like that of the
winter of 1906-7, travels west, the birds flying for life before it
advance along the Cornish country until they come to a point beyond
which they cannot go, for the affrighting ocean is before them and they
are spent with hunger and cold. They come in a continuous stream, to
congregate in tens of thousands, covering the cliffs and fields and
stone hedges; and the villagers turn out with guns and nets and sticks
and stones to get their fill of killing.

So in the dreadful past, whenever a wave of Celtic conquest swept west,
the unhappy people were driven further and further from the Tamar along
that tongue of land, their last refuge, but where there were no rivers
and mountains to stay the pursuers, nor forests and marshes in which to
hide, until they could go no further, for the salt sea was in front of
them. They too, like the frost-afflicted birds, gathered in thousands
and sat crowded in every headland and promontory and every stony hill
summit, ever turning their worn dusty faces and glazed eyes to the east
to watch for the coming of the foe--the strong, fiendish, broadfaced,
blue-eyed men with metal weapons in their hands, spear and sword and
battle-axe.

These are the people I think about on dark tempestuous evenings in this
solitary place; Bolerium is haunted by the vast ghostly multitude.

[Illustration: 0083]




CHAPTER VI CASTLES BY THE SEA

CASTLES BY THE SEA

_The rocky forelands--Delightful days--Colour of the sea--Wild-bird
life--Montgomery's Pelican Island--Gulls and daws--We envy birds
their wings--The sense of sublimity--Cormorants--Ravens and
superstition--Gurnard's Head--A first visit--A siesta in a dangerous
place--The hunter's vision._

|IF "dark Bolerium" seemed best on tempestuous midwinter evenings
because of the spirit of the place, the sentiment, it was not so with
the numerous other forelands along this rude coast. I haunted them by
day, and the finer the weather the better I liked them. It is true that
they too have dark associations from which one cannot wholly escape.
The huge masses of rock rising high above the cliff on many of these
promontories have the appearance of gigantic castles by the sea, and
that they served as castles to the ancient inhabitants of the land we
know, as in many instances the primitive earthworks, the trench and
embankment raised to cut them off from the land, remain to this day. Rut
the thought of the "dreadful past" is not so insistent in these castles,
which were my houses by the sea, as at the Land's End promontory, and
would almost vanish in the brilliant sunshine and in view of the wide
expanse of ocean flecked with dazzling foam.

I could hardly imagine a higher pleasure than was mine on many a bright
day in winter and spring, when I had the whole coast pretty well to
myself and spent long hours in rambling from point to point and in
gazing out on the sea from my seat on some rocky pile that crowned one
of the bolder headlands.

I had heard a good deal about the beautiful colour of the sea in these
parts, yet was often surprised at the sight of it. I had seen no such
blues and greens on any other part of the British coast; and no such
purples in the shallower waters within the caves and near the cliffs
where the rocks beneath were overgrown with seaweed. Where these great
purple patches appeared on the pure brilliant green it was veritably a
"wine-purple sea" and looked as if hundreds of hogsheads of claret or
Burgundy had been emptied into it.

But the sea and its colour and the joy of a vast expanse would not have
drawn me so often to the castled forelands nor held me so long but for
the birds that haunted them, seeing that this visible world is to me
but a sad and empty place without wonderful life and the varied forms of
life, which are in harmony with it, and give it a meaning, and a grace
and beauty and splendour not its own. If there be no visible wild life,
then I am like that wandering being or spirit in Montgomery's _Pelican
Island,_ who was alone on the earth before life was, and had no
knowledge or intimation of any intelligence but its own; who roamed over
the seas that tumbled round the globe for thousands and thousands of
years, flying ever from its own loneliness and vainly seeking comfort
and happiness in loving and being the companion of wind and cloud and
wave, and day and night, and sun and moon and stars, and all inanimate
things.

Sitting on a rock on the edge of one of these headlands I could watch
those glorious fishers in the sea, the gannets, by the hour; but this
bird is so great, being now the greatest left to us in Cornwall, or
rather in the seas that wash its shores, and its habits so interesting,
that I must by and by devote an entire chapter to it. Gulls and daws
were the common species, always to be seen floating and wheeling about
the promontory, a black and white company, with sharp yelping voices and
hoarse and laughter-like cries; never wholly free from anxiety when I
was by, never fully convinced of my peaceful intentions. Their habits
are well known: I was not expecting any new discovery about them, it
was simply the delight of seeing them which kept me to the crags. Sturge
Moore says in a poem on "Wings":

               That man who wishes not for wings,

                   Must be the slave of care;

               For birds that have them move so well

                   And softly through the air:

               They venture far into the sky,

               If not so far as thoughts and angels fly.

               Feather from under feather springs;

                   All open like a fan;

               Our eyes upon their beauty dwell

                   And marvel at the plan

               By which things made for use so rare

               Are powerful and delicate and fair.

In Calderon's celebrated drama, _Life's a Dream_, when Sigismund laments
his miserable destiny, comparing it with that of the wild creatures
which inhabited the forest where he is kept a prisoner, the contrast
between his lot and theirs seems greatest when he considers the birds,
perfect in form, lovely in colouring, graceful in their motions, and so
wonderful in their faculty of flight; while he, a being with a higher
nature, a greater, more aspiring soul, had no such liberty! We need not
be so unhappy as the Polish prince to envy the birds their freedom. I
watch and am never tired of watching their play. They rise and fall and
circle, and swerve to this side and to that, and are like sportive
flies in a room which has the wind-roughened ocean for a floor, and the
granite cliffs for walls, and the vast void sky for ceiling. The air is
their element: they float on it and are borne by it, abandoned to it,
effortless, even as a ball of thistledown is borne; and then, merely by
willing it, without any putting forth of strength, without a pulsation,
to rise vertically a thousand feet, to dwell again and float upon an
upper current, to survey the world from a greater altitude and rejoice
in a vaster horizon. To fly like that! To do it all unconsciously,
merely by bringing this or that set of ten thousand flight muscles into
play, as we will to rise, to float, to fall, to go this way or that--to
let the wind do it all for us, as it were, while the sight is occupied
in seeing and the mind is wholly free! The balloons and other wretched
machines to which men tie themselves to mount above the earth serve only
to make the birds' lot more enviable. I would fly and live like them in
the air, not merely for the pleasure of the aerial exercise, but also to
experience in larger measure the sense of sublimity.

But this is a delusion, seeing that we possess such a sense only because
we are bound to earth, because vast cliffs overhanging the sea and other
altitudes are in some degree dangerous. At all events Nature says they
are, and we are compelled to bow to her whether we know better or not.
We cannot get over the instinct of the heavy mammalian that goes on the
ground, whose inherited knowledge is that it is death or terrible injury
to fall from a considerable height. Only so long as we are quite safe
is this instinct a pleasurable one; but when we look over the edge of a
sheer precipice, how often, in spite of reason, does the pleasure, the
fearful joy, lose itself in apprehension! Could we know that it would
not hurt us to drop off, purposely or by accident, that the air itself
and a mysterious faculty in us would sustain us, that it would no more
hurt us to be flung from the summit of a cliff than it would hurt a
jackdaw, we should be as the bird is, without a sense of sublimity.

Daw and herring gull, the most abundant species, were but two of several
kinds I was accustomed to see from the headlands, and some of the others
were greater birds--the great black-backed gull, as big a gull as there
is in the world, who had a rock to himself near the Land's End, where
four or five couples could be seen congregated; and the shag, the
cormorant which abounds most on this coast. They are heavy, ungainly
flyers, and have an ugly reptilian look when fishing in the sea, but
seen standing erect and motionless, airing their spread wings, they have
a noble decorative appearance, like carved bird-figures on the wet black
jagged rocks amid the green and white tumultuous sea. There, too, was
the ancient raven, and he was the most irreconcilable of all. At
one spot on the cliff close to where I was staying a solitary raven
invariably turned up to shadow me. He would fly up and down, then
alight on a rock a hundred yards away or more and watch me, occasionally
emitting his deep hoarse human-like croak; but it failed to frighten me
away or put me in a passion, as I was not a native. The Cornishman of
the coast, when he hears that ominous sound, mocks the bird: "Corpse!
corpse! you devil! If I had a gun I'd give you corpse!" It is not
strange the raven views the human form divine with suspicion in these
parts: he is much persecuted by the religious people hereabouts, and
when they cannot climb up or down to his nest on a ledge of the cliff,
they are sometimes able to destroy it by setting fire to a furze bush
and dropping it upon the nest from above.

[Illustration: 0089]

The rocky forelands I haunted were many, but the favourite one was
Gurnard's Head, situated about midway between St. Ives and Land's End.
It is the grandest and one of the most marked features of that bold
coast. Seen from a distance, from one point of view, the promontory
suggests the figure of a Sphinx, the entire body lying out from the
cliff, the waves washing over its huge black outstretched paws and
beating on its breast, its stupendous deformed face composed of piled
masses of granite looking out on the Atlantic. I was often there
afterwards, spending long hours sitting on the rocks of the great head
and shoulders, watching the sea and the birds that live in it; and
later, when April set the tiny bell of the rock pipit tinkling, and the
wheatear, hovering over the crags, dropped his brief delicious warble,
and when the early delicate flowers touched the rocks and turf with
tender, brilliant colour, I was more enamoured than ever of my lonely
castle by the sea. Forced to leave it I could but chew samphire and fill
my pockets with its clustered green finger-like leaves, so as to have
the wild flavour of that enchanting place as long as possible in my
mouth and its perfume about me.

Now I wish only to relate an adventure which befell me on that midwinter
day on the occasion of my first visit, when nothing happened and I saw
nothing particular except with the mind's eye, for this was an adventure
of the spirit.

It was one of those perfect days when the sun shines from an unclouded
sky and the wind that raves without ceasing at last falls asleep and the
whole world sleeps in the warm, brilliant light, albeit with eyes wide
open like a basking snake. I was abroad early, and after wandering over
a good many miles of moor and climbing several hills I arrived at my
destination, tired and very hungry, and the first thing I did was to
lunch heartily on bread and cheese and beer at the inn which you find
at a short distance from the promontory. Naturally after my meal and an
hour's scramble over the rough rocks of the headland I felt disposed
to take a good rest before setting out on my return, and I soon found a
suitable spot--a slab of stone lying with a slope to the sea on the
edge of the crag. It was like a table-top with a rich cloth of grey and
orange-coloured lichen covering it, and was very warm in the sun, and to
make it more comfortable I rolled up my waterproof and put it under my
head, so that lying there at full length I could still look at the sea
and the gulls and gannets passing and repassing before me.

[Illustration: 0091]

In a very few minutes I began to grow drowsy. So much the better, I
thought; for never is sleep more sweet and refreshing to a tired
man than when it comes to him under the wide sky on a warm day. The
sensation of being overcome is itself very delightful, so I did not
resist but welcomed it, albeit quite conscious that it was there in
me and would soon have me in its power. In a vague way I even felt
interested and amused at the process: I could imagine that the spirit
of sleep was there in person, kneeling on the rock behind my head and
making her passes, until the wide sea and wide sky began to seem all of
one colour and the figures of the gulls and gannets to grow vaguer
as they passed before me. Presently I was in that state when the mind
ceases to think, when the place of thought is taken by pictures from
memory, which come, as it were, floating before us to pass away and be
succeeded by others and still others without any connection. They are
not "suggestions of contiguity" nor even of "analogy": they are not
suggestions at all, and come we know not how or why.

Now among these visions or pictures of things seen or heard or read of
there was one described in a poem called "The Hunter's Vision," which
had been lying for years unknown or forgotten in some dusty lumber-room
of the brain. I read it first in my early years, and though it was poor
poetry it powerfully affected me, partly because I was a hunter myself
in those days, although only a boy hunter, and often wandered far into
lonely places, and sometimes when faint with heat and fatigue I rested
and even fell asleep in the shadow of a bush or of my own horse. The
poem relates how the tired hunter at noon sat down to rest on a jutting
crag on the steep mountain side where he had been climbing, and how when
gazing before him the burning heavens and vast plains of earth, scorched
brown by the summer sun, grew misty and dim to his sight, then gradually
changed to a vision of his early home. He knew it well--the old familiar
scene--and those who were assembled there to welcome him; how could he
but know them--his long dead and long lost; they were there gazing at
him and some were coming with outstretched arms towards him, their faces
shining with joy. The very words of the poem came back to me with the
picture:

                   Forward with fixed and eager eyes

                   The hunter leaned in act to rise.

But he leaned too far in his eagerness and slipped from the crag and
woke, if he ever woke at all, to know for one brief, bitter moment that
he was lost for ever.

It is a story to be told, whether in verse or prose, in the simplest,
directest manner; for is there a more poignant grief than that of the
lonely, weary man, especially in some solitary place, who remembers his
loneliness, that he is divided by death and change and absence from
his own kin who were dearer than all the world to him? And just as his
thought is the saddest, so the dream of a return to and reunion with the
lost ones is assuredly the most blissful he can know.

Now, on the verge of sleep, seeing that picture pass before me--the
ineffable sadness of the lonely hunter in the wilderness, the vision,
the unutterable joy, and the fearful end, I thought (for thought now
came to me) of my own case--my loneliness, for I, too, was lonely, not
because I was there by myself on that promontory, but because a whole
ocean and the impassable ocean of death separated me from my own people.
Then it came into my mind that I, too, fast falling into oblivion, would
experience that blissful vision; that the hoarse sound of the sea far
below on the rocks would sink and change to the sound of the summer wind
in the old poplars, that I would see the old roof and all those I first
knew and loved on the earth--see them as in the old days "returned in
beauty from the dust," and seeing them should start forward "in act to
rise," and so end my wanderings by falling from that sloping, perilous
rock!

In a moment I became wide awake, for I did not wish to perish by
accident just yet, and, jumping up, I stretched out my arms, stamped
with my feet, and rubbed my eyes vigorously to get rid of my drowsiness;
then sat down quietly and resumed my watch of gulls and gannets.

[Illustration: 0096]




CHAPTER VII THE BRITISH PELICAN

_The gannet--Gannets at St. Ives--At Treen Dinas--Appearance of the
bird when fishing--The rise before the fall--Gannet and gull--A
contrast--Gull and Great Northern Diver--Gulls and gannets in the
pilchard season--Bass, pollack and sand-eels--An extraordinary
accident._

|BRITISH pelican" may seem almost too grand a name for a bird the size
of our gannet, or Solan goose; but he is of that family, and was
once, in the Linnæan classification, of the very genus--a _Pelicanus._
Moreover, in this land of small birds--thanks to the barbarians who have
extirpated the big ones--the _Sula bassana_ is very large, being little
inferior to the goose, though he is certainly small compared with his
magnificent rose-coloured relation, the greatest of the true pelicans.

Until I came to Cornwall I never had a proper opportunity of observing
this noble fowl and his fishing methods; here he is common all round the
coast, especially in the winter months, and when, as frequently happens,
he fishes close to the land, he may be watched very comfortably by the
hour from a seat on some high foreland. A rock two or three hundred feet
above the sea is the very best position for the spectator; the birds
float to and fro almost on a level with his eyes, and their beautiful
motions can be better seen than from a boat or ship.

Standing on the yellow sands in the little cove behind St. Ives I
watched the tide coming in one rough cloudy evening, the sea as it
advanced rising into big glassy billows of a clear glaucous green colour
before bursting in foam and spray running far and wide over the pale
smooth sandy floor. Close behind the advancing waves a number of birds
were flying to and fro, mostly herring gulls, but there were also a good
many gannets. These moved up and down in a series of wide curves at a
rate of speed which never varied, with two or three or four beats of the
powerful, pointed, black-tipped white wings, followed by a long interval
of gliding; the bird always keeping at a height of about twenty-five
feet above the surface, and, without an instant's pause or hesitation,
dashing obliquely into the sea after its prey.

That is how they fish sometimes, flying low and seeing the fishes a
good distance ahead, and is but one of several methods. When next I
was watching them their manner was very different. The air was calm
and clear and full of bright sunlight, and I watched them from the
stupendous mass of rock forming the headland on which stands the famous
Logan Rock.

The birds were in considerable numbers, sweeping round in great curves
and circles at a uniform height of about two hundred and fifty feet from
the surface. They were distributed over an immense area; ranging, in
fact, over the entire visible sea, from those that fished within a
couple of hundred yards off the rocks on which I sat, to the furthest
away, which appeared as moving white specks on the horizon. When fishing
from that height the gannet drops straight down on its prey, striking
the sea with such force as to send up a column of water eight or ten
feet high, the bird disappearing from sight for a space of five or six
seconds, or longer, then rising and after floating a few moments on the
surface rising laboriously to resume its flight as before.

The fall of the big white bird from such a height is a magnificent
spectacle, and causes the spectator to hold his breath as he watches
it with closed wings hurl itself down as if to certain perdition. The
tremendous shock of the blow on the sea would certainly kill the bird
but for the wad of dense elastic plumage which covers and protects it.
For it hits itself as hard as it hits the sea, and how hard that is we
may know when we watch the gannet drop perpendicularly like a big white
stone, and when at a distance of a quarter of a mile we can see the
column of water thrown up and distinctly hear the loud splash. Yet no
sooner has it hurled itself into the sea than it is out again as if
nothing had happened, ready for another fall and blow!

One wonders how, when the gannet is flying high, on catching sight of
a fish directly beneath him in the water, he is able instantly to check
his course, get into position and fall just at the right spot. One would
suppose that he could not do it, that the impetus of so heavy a body
moving swiftly through the air would carry him many yards beyond the
spot, and that he would have to return and search again. He does not, in
fact, bring himself to a sudden stop as the small light kestrel is able
to do, nor does he, I think, keep the fish all the time in his eye, but
he is nevertheless able to accomplish his purpose, and in this way: The
instant a fish is detected the bird shoots up a distance of a dozen to
twenty feet; thus the swift motion is not arrested, but its direction
changed from horizontal to vertical, and this is probably brought about
by a lightning-quick change in the set of the wing feathers; but it is
a change which the eye cannot detect, even with the aid of the most
powerful binocular. The upward movement is not exactly vertical; it
describes a slight curve, and, at the top, when the impetus which
carried him up has spent itself, the bird wheels round, turning half
over and bringing his head down, pointing to the sea. I suppose that he
then quickly recovers the fish he had lost sight of for a moment, for
with a pause of scarcely a second he then closes his wings and lets
himself fall.

On this calm, bright day, with scores of birds in sight, I was well able
to observe this beautiful aerial maoeuvre--a sort of looping the loop,
and seemingly an almost impossible feat which they yet accomplish with
such apparent ease.

The spectacle of many gannets fishing, all moving in a perpetual
series of curves, wavering lines and half circles, at exactly the same
altitude, and all performing the same set of actions on spying a fish,
produces the idea that they are automata moved by extraneous forces, and
are incapable of varying their mode of action. As a fact, they vary it
constantly according to the state of the atmosphere and the sea, and
probably also the depth at which the fish are swimming. But whatever the
method for the day may be, one is impressed and amazed at the marvellous
energy of the bird, and this strikes us most when we see gannets and
gulls together.

The gull is a waiter on the tide, and on wind and rain and sunshine and
any change which may bring him something to eat--a sort of feathered Mr.
Micawber among sea-birds. His indolent happy-go-lucky way of making a
living reminds you of his friend the fisherman who, when not fishing,
can do nothing but lounge on the quay with his hands in his pockets, or
stand leaning against a sunny wall revolving the quid in his mouth and
making an occasional remark to the idler nearest to him. H is brief and
furious fits of activity are followed by long intervals of repose, when
he floats at the will of wind and wave on the sea or sits dozing on a
rock. He also spends a good deal of his time in a kind of loitering,
probably waiting for something to turn up, when he is seen in a loose
company scattered far and wide about the sea, one here, two or three a
little distance off, and a few more a hundred yards away; others flying
about in an aimless way, dropping down at intervals as if to exchange
remarks with those on the water, then wandering off again.

One day sitting on a rock at Gurnard's Head, I watched a company of
forty or fifty gannets fishing in a calm sea where a great many herring
and lesser black-backed gulls were scattered about idly rocking on the
surface in their usual way. The gannets were sweeping round at a height
of about a hundred feet, and were finding fish in plenty as their falls
into the sea were pretty frequent. The gulls saw nothing, or knew that
the fishes were not for them, and they were consequently not in the
least excited. By and by I saw a gannet drop upon the sea just where two
gulls were floating, sending a cloud of spray over one bird and causing
both to rock and toss about like little white boats in a whirlpool. I
could imagine one of those gulls gasping with astonishment and remarking
to his fellow: "That was a nice thing, wasn't it! Coming down on me like
that without a by-your-leave! I suppose if the fish had been swimming
right under me he would have run me through with his confounded beak;
and when he had shaken me off and seen me floating dead on the water,
he would have said that it served me jolly well right for getting in
his way! Certainly these gannets are the greatest brutes out--but what
fishers!--and what splendid fellows!"

Gulls are all robbers by instinct but have not the power and courage
of the predaceous Bonxie or Great Skua of the Shetlands, a pirate by
profession who lives mainly on the labours of others. The gull must
fend for himself and levy tribute when he gets the chance, when he can
intimidate some other bird or snatch a morsel from his beak. From the
gannet he gets nothing; it would be dangerous for him to come in that
bird's way, and no sooner is the fish caught than it is swallowed. The
gannet takes no more notice of the gull than of a bubble floating on
the surface, and probably does not even know that the negligible bird
regards his fishing operations with a good deal of interest and hungrily
wishes he could have a share in the spoil. But how far gulls will go in
their desire to get something for nothing may be seen in the following
incident which was witnessed by some fishermen at Sennen Cove, close to
the Land's End. A Great Northern Diver made its appearance at the cove
and spent a part of the winter there, and as he was not disturbed and
grew accustomed to the sight of human beings he lost all shyness and
often fished close to the rocks where the men stood watching him. One
day they saw him with a small flat fish which he could not swallow; it
was too broad to go down his gullet, but he would not let it escape and
continued to toss it up and catch it again, as if determined to get it
down somehow. Or it may have been that he was only playing with it just
as a cat when not hungry plays with a mouse. By and by a black-backed
gull swam to him and began following him and making snatches at the
flounder each time the diver tossed it up. But the diver would not let
him have the fish, he simply turned round to get away from the teasing
gull, and the quiet way in which he took it only emboldened the other
until he became quite excited and was almost violent in his efforts to
get the fish. Then suddenly the diver, dropping the fish, turned on him
and struck him like lightning, driving his sharp powerful beak into his
neck or the base of the skull. The gull flapped his wings violently
once or twice, then turned over and floated away, belly up, quite
dead. Instantly after dealing the blow, the diver went down and quickly
reappeared with the flounder, and resumed tossing and catching it again,
just as if nothing had happened, while the dead gull slowly drifted
further and further away.

What struck the men who witnessed the tragic incident as most remarkable
was the sudden change in the temper of the diver, when he turned at
last on the other, dealt him the swift killing blow, then immediately
returned to his play with the fish as if the slaying of that big
formidable bird had affected him no more than it would have done to
shake off a drop of water. My thought on hearing about it was that the
act of the diver was wonderfully like that of many a human being to
whom killing is no murder, who kills in a casual way because of some
religious or ethical or political idea, or merely because he has
been annoyed or stung into a fit of anger, and who, the killing done,
recovers his normal placid temper and thinks no more about it.

An exceedingly painful incident of this kind is related by Darwin
in describing the natives of Tierra del Fuego in his _Voyage of a
Naturalist_. Another very pathetic case is related by Browning, in the
_Dramatic Idylls_, in which the woodcutter in a Russian village who is
able to handle his axe so deftly strikes off the head of a young woman
who has just escaped from the wolves that pursued her in the forest.
They sprang upon her in her sleigh and dragged her child from her arms;
the pious woodcutter thought she should have allowed herself to be torn
to pieces before releasing the child. Then, after striking her head off
he goes to his cottage, puts down the axe, and plays with his children
on the floor and is greatly surprised that any fuss should be made by
his fellow-villagers at what he had done.

The gulls have a particularly uncomfortable time when, as occasionally
happens during the pilchard fishing, a number of gannets appear to claim
their share in the spoil. No sooner has the circle of the seine been
completed, forming a pool teeming with fish in the sea as it were,
than the gulls are there in a dense crowd. Then if the gannets appear
hovering over them and hurling themselves down like rocks into the seine
the gulls scatter in consternation and have to wait their turn. The
wonder is that the gannets diving with such violence, bird following
bird so closely, all in so small an area, do not collide and kill each
other. Somehow as by a miracle they escape accidents, and when they have
gorged until they can gorge no more they retire to digest their meal at
sea, and immediately the gulls return to feast with a tremendous noise
and much squabbling, each bird fighting to deprive his neighbour of the
fish he picks up. This lasts until the gannets, having quickly digested
their first meal or got rid of it by drinking sea-water, return with
a fresh appetite for a second one, and the poor gulls are once more
compelled to leave that delectable spot, teeming and glittering with
myriads of rushing, leaping, terrified pilchards.

At other times, when fishing-birds are attracted to one spot by shoals
of mackerel, herring, sprats or pilchards, gulls and gannets feast
together very comfortably, and as the gulls take good care not to get
in the way of their too energetic neighbours there are probably no
accidents. Occasionally at such times they have an opportunity of
feeding on the launce or sand-eel, a favourite food of all the rapacious
creatures, fish and fowl, that get their living in the sea. The launce
is a long slender eel-like silvery fish that has the curious habit of
burying itself in the sand, and it is said that when out feeding if
pursued it instinctively darts down to the bottom of the sea to escape
by burying itself in the sand. Bass and pollack are the greatest
persecutors of the launce, and when a number of these greedy fishes come
upon a shoal of sand-eels in deep water they get beneath them to hold
them up, and surround them as well to prevent their escape. Day, in his
_British Fishes_, states that pollack have been observed acting in this
way on the coast of Norway; but many Cornish fishermen have witnessed
it too, though it has not been described by Jonathan Couch and other
writers on the habits of the native fishes as occurring in our waters.
A native of Hayle, a boatman and a keen observer of bird and fish life,
gave me the following account of a scene he witnessed in St. Ives Bay,
not far from the Godrevy Lighthouse. His attention was attracted by a
great concourse of gulls and gannets, and rowing to the spot he found
the surface of the sea boiling with an immense shoal of sand-eels
rushing about on the surface and leaping clean out of the water in their
efforts to escape from their pursuers. It was a very unusual sight, as
the shoals of sand-eels are usually small, but here they swarmed at the
surface over a very large area--probably six or seven acres. It was a
fine bright day and the water being marvellously clear he could see
the pollack ranging swiftly about at a considerable depth and rising at
intervals to the surface to capture their prey. Meanwhile the birds in
hundreds were hovering overhead, the gannets coming down in their usual
way like huge stones hurled into the sea, the gulls swooping lightly and
snatching their prey and rising with the long silvery wriggling fishes
in their beaks.

Every gull thus rising with a launce in its beak was of course instantly
pursued and set upon by all the others flying near and had to fight
furiously to retain his capture.

That is invariably the gull's way: even when fish are swarming on
the surface and easily taken they must give vent to their predatory
instincts and waste time and energy in robbing one another and in
squabbling and screaming, instead of every bird trying to catch as many
as he can for himself. It is very different with the gannet; he never
in all his life--and it may be a life of a century or longer for all we
know to the contrary--wastes as much energy as would be the equivalent
of a single feather's weight in trying to take a morsel out of the beak
of another gannet or bird of any kind. One might say that his faculties
are so perfect, his power so great, that he has no need to descend to
such courses. Indeed, so admirably is he fitted for his sea life, that
when we view him in very bad weather, when he is travelling, following
the coastline, in an everlasting succession of beautiful curves and
wave-like risings and fallings; and when he is fishing, even when the
sky is black with tempests and the tumbling ocean is all grey and white
with whirling spindrift; when the furious wind has blown the whole tribe
of gulls inland many a league, he appears to us as a part of it all--of
wave and spray and wind and cloud--a fragment, one of a million, torn
away by the blast, into which a guiding spirit or intelligent principle
or particle has been blown to make it cohere and give it form and weight
and indestructibility.

I can but express it in my blundering fashion, but the thought has been
in my mind when, sitting on a rock on some high foreland, I have watched
the gannets passing by the hour, travelling to some distant feeding area
or to their breeding haunts in the far north; a procession many a league
long, but a very thin procession of twos and twos, every bird with his
mate, following the trend of the coast, each bird in turn now above the
sea, now down in the shelter of a big incoming wave, and every curve and
every rise and fall of one so exactly repeated by the other as to
give the idea of a bird and its shadow or reflection, with bird and
reflection continually changing places.

After seeing the gannet every day for months one would be apt to think
that this species is incapable of making a mistake and is beyond reach
of accidents, but that cannot be supposed of any living creature,
however perfect the correspondence may appear between it and the
environment. At Sennen I heard of an extraordinary mishap which befell
and caused the destruction of a large number of gannets. It was told to
me by several of the fishermen who witnessed it at Sennen Cove, at the
Land's End, and by a gentleman of the place, who is a keen ornithologist
and was present at the time. A strong wind was blowing straight into the
bay, and there was a very big sea on. The sea, they told me, presented
a singular appearance on account of the enormous waves rolling in; the
village people, in fact, were all out watching it. A large number
of gannets were busy fishing and were coming further and further in,
following the shoal. Then a wonderful thing happened on this day of
wonders; the wind which had been blowing a gale fell quite suddenly and
was succeeded in a very few minutes by a perfect calm. Some of the men
assured me they had never known such a thing happen before. I have known
it once, and that was in South America, when a violent southwest wind
which had been blowing for many hours dropped suddenly, and the air was
a dead calm before the loud noise of the gale in the trees was out of
my ears. The change was disastrous to the gannets; in that windless
atmosphere in the sheltered bay and with the sea in that state they
could not rise. They were seen struggling on the water and carried
shore-wards by the huge incoming waves; but their fellows flying to
and fro above them, intent on their prey, did not see or heed their
distress; they continued dashing down into the sea, bird after bird, and
every one that hurled itself down remained down, until they were all in
the sea, all vainly flapping and struggling to keep out and still being
carried nearer and nearer to the shore. Then the waves began to fling
them out on the flat sandy beach, and as wave followed wave, bringing
more and more of the birds, the men and boys who were watching went mad
with excitement and set off at a run, every one as he went snatching up
a stick or an iron bar or whatever would serve as a weapon. There was no
escape for the birds, for their wings could not lift them, and they
were slaughtered without mercy, even as shipwrecked men on this dreadful
coast in the ancient days had been slaughtered, and the sands were
covered with their carcasses. The ancient wreckers got something from
the unhappy wretches they slew, but these people got nothing from the
gannets. I asked them why they slew the birds, and they could only shrug
their shoulders or answer that they had the birds cast out by the sea
at their mercy--what was there to do but to kill them? And it was added
that after all, being dead, they did serve some good purpose, for by and
by a farmer came and carried them away by cartloads to manure his land.

[Illustration: 0111]




CHAPTER VIII BIRD LIFE IN WINTER

_Land birds--Gulls in bad weather--Jackdaw and donkeys--Birds in the
field--Yellowhammers--A miracle of the sun--The common sparrow--An
old disused tin-mine--Sparrows roosting in a pit--Magpies'
language--Goldcrests in the furze bushes--The Cornish wren--The sad
little Meadow Pipit._

|A GOOD deal of space has already been given to the sea-birds of this
coast, but the land-birds deserve a chapter too. I do not wish, however,
to give an account or a list of all of them, but would rather follow
Carew's example, and note only "such as minister some particular cause
of remembrance." The reader who would have more than this must seek for
it in one of those "hasty schedules or inventories of God's property
made by some clerk"--the local ornithologies and lists of species in the
Victorian and other histories and various other works. On this exposed,
wind-beaten, treeless coast country one does not expect to find an
abundant or varied bird life; nevertheless in this unpromising place
and in winter I had altogether a very pleasant time with the feathered
people.

When the weather was too bad for the cliffs the gulls were driven
inland. Gannets and cormorants could endure it; the sea was their true
home and abiding-place and they were not to be torn from it; but the
vagrant, unsettled and somewhat unballasted gulls would not or could not
stay, and were like froth of the breakers which is caught up and whirled
inland by the blast. On such days (and they were many) the gulls were
all over the land, wandering about in their usual aimless manner, or
in flocks seen resting on the grass in the shelter of a stone wall, or
mixing loosely with companies of daws, rooks, peewits and other skilful
worm and grub hunters, waiting idly for the chance of snatching a morsel
from a neighbour's beak.

I was a little like the gulls in my habits: on fine days the cliffs and
cliff castles were my favourite haunts; in very rough weather my rambles
were mostly away from the sea, where I had my old companions of the sea
wall, the gulls and daws, still with me. So much has already been said
of this last species in former chapters that I might appear to be giving
him too great prominence to bring him in again. Yet I must do so just
to relate a little scene I witnessed in which this bird had a principal
part, the other characters being donkeys.

The donkey is almost the only domestic creature one meets with out
on the rough high moor and among the stony hills. Cows and horses are
occasionally seen, but they do not strike one as native to the place
as the donkey does. He is a sort of link between the homestead and
the wilderness. The donkey is man's poor, patient, anciently-broken
creature, but when he roams abroad in quest of that tough and juiceless
fodder on the desolate heath and hillsides--a food thought good enough
for the likes of him, or the likes of he, as his master would say--he
fits into the scene as the cow and horse certainly do not. He is not so
big, and his rough, dirty or dusty coat of dull indeterminate greys
and earthy and heather-like browns makes him harmonise with his
surroundings. His long-drawn reiterated droning and whistling cry
strikes one, too, as a voice of the wild incult places. On this account
I have a very friendly feeling for him, and was always pleased at
meeting with donkeys in my solitary walks, which was often enough, as
most persons keep one or more in these parts. He is a good servant, and
costs nothing to keep. Frequently I turn aside to speak to them, and as
a rule they turn their backs or hinder parts on me, as much as to say
that they have enough of human beings in the village: here they prefer
to be left alone. But when I produce an apple from my pocket they at
once think better of it, and gather round me very much interested in the
apple, and quite willing for the sake of the apple to let me rub their
noses and pull their ears.

One day, walking softly through a thicket of very high furze bushes, I
came to a small green open space in which were three donkeys, one lying
stretched out full length on the bed of moss with a jackdaw sitting
on his ribs busily searching for ticks or parasites of some kind and
picking them from his skin. The other two donkeys were standing by,
gazing at the busy bird and probably envying their comrade his good
luck. My sudden appearance at a distance of two or three yards greatly
alarmed them. Away flew the daw, and up jumped the recumbent donkey, and
then all three stared at me, not at all pleased at the intrusion.

It seemed to me on this occasion that in the daw, the friend and helper
of our poor slave the donkey, the bird that in its corvine intelligence
and cunning approaches nearest to ourselves among the avians, we have
yet another link uniting man to his wild fellow-creatures.

There is a good deal of rough weather but little frost in this district;
behind the cliffs, sheltered by stone hedges and thickets of furze, the
green field is the chief feeding-ground of the birds; there with the
rooks and daws and gulls and peewits you find fieldfares--the bluebird
of the natives--and missel-thrushes in flocks, and the greybird, as
the song-thrush is called, the blackbird and small troops of wintering
larks. Most abundant is the starling, a winter visitor too, for he
does not breed in this part of Cornwall. You will find a flock in every
little field, and the sight of your head above the stone wall sends them
off with a rush, emitting the low guttural alarm note which sounds like
running water.

[Illustration: 0115]

The yellowhammer is a common resident species here. We usually think
him an uninteresting bird on account of his phlegmatic disposition and
monotonous song, but in this district, in winter, I found him curiously
attractive, and among the modestly-coloured birds that were his
neighbours he was certainly the most splendid. That may appear a word
better suited to the golden oriole, but I am thinking of one of his
aspects, as I frequently saw him, and of a miracle of the sun. Here, in
winter, he congregates in small companies or flocks at the farms, and at
one small farm where there was a rather better shelter than at most of
the others, owing to the way the houses and outhouses and ricks were
grouped together, the company of wintering yellowhammers numbered about
eighty or ninety. Every evening, when there was any sun, these birds
would gather on some spot--a rick or barn roof or on the dark green
bushes--sheltered from the sea wind, where they could catch the last
rays. Sitting motionless grouped together in such numbers they made a
strangely pretty picture.

One evening, at another farm-house, I was standing out of doors talking
with the farmer, when the sun came out beneath a bank of dark cloud and
shone level on the slate roof of a cow-house near us. It was an old
roof on which the oxidised slate had taken a soft blue-grey or dove
colour--the one beautiful colour ever seen in weathered slate; and no
sooner had the light fallen on it than a number of yellow-hammers flew
from some other point where they had been sitting and dropped down upon
this roof. They were scattered over the slates, and, sitting motionless
with heads drawn in and plumage bunched out, they were like golden
images of birds, as if the sun had poured a golden-coloured light into
their loose feathers to make them shine.

The grey wagtail and the goldfinch, in small numbers, both beautiful
birds, were wintering here, but they could not compare with those
transfigured yellowhammers I had seen.

As for the vulgar sparrow, nothing--not even the miracle-working
sun--could make him brilliant or beautiful to look at, and I have indeed
acquired the habit of not looking and not seeing the undesired thing.
That is, in the country: in London it is different; there I can be
thankful for the sparrow where he does us (and the better birds) no harm
and lives very comfortably on the crumbs that fall from our tables. Yet
now, at one spot on this coast, I was surprised into paying particular
attention to the sparrows on account of a winter custom they had
acquired.

One day on very rough land, half a mile from the cliff, I came on a
piece of ground of about two acres in extent surrounded by a big stone
hedge, without gap or gate. It was the site of an old tin-mine abandoned
fifty or sixty years ago and walled round to prevent the domestic
animals from the neighbouring farms falling into the pits. It was
strange that so much trouble had been taken for such an object, as in
all the other disused mining pits I had come upon in the district the
holes had simply been covered over with wood and big stones, or they
remained open and the cattle were left to take their chance. The stone
hedge was covered with a thick growth of furze, and the ground inside,
protected as it was from the cattle and sheltered by the wall from the
furious winds, had become a dense and in places impenetrable thicket of
blackthorn, bramble, furze and ivy. So close did the blackthorn bushes
grow with their upper branches tightly interwoven that it would have
been possible to walk on the top of the thicket at a height of twelve or
fourteen feet from the ground without the foot slipping through. There
were three pits, and one, very much enlarged owing to the quantity of
earth which had fallen in, was entirely occupied with a big elder bush,
or tree--a curiosity in this treeless district. It was rooted in the
side of the pit about fourteen feet below the surface, and its whole
height was about thirty feet. Near the root the trunk divided into
three great branches, or boles, and on the middle one there was an old
magpie's nest on a level with my shoulders and a little beyond the reach
of my hand. The birds were perhaps wise to build in such a place, since
a boy could not easily rob it without danger of falling into the pit.

On going to this walled-in thicket one evening I observed a vast
concourse of sparrows. They were sitting on the bushes in thousands, and
more birds in small companies of a dozen or so, and in small flocks of
fifty to a hundred, were continually arriving and settling down among
the others to add their voices to the extraordinary hubbub they kept up.
It was like a starling's winter roosting-place, and the birds must have
come from all the homesteads on either side for a good many miles.
These birds, I found, roosted in the old pits, and when they had all
disappeared from sight and the loud noise of chirruping had died into
silence I walked up to one of the pits and stood over it. The birds took
alarm and began to issue out, coming up in rushes of several hundreds at
a time, rush succeeding rush at intervals of a few seconds while I stood
by, but when I retired to some distance the birds would come up in a
continuous stream which sometimes looked in the fading light like a
column of smoke rising from the ground.

Three months later, when the sparrows were breeding and spending their
nights at home, I revisited the spot, and going to the pit with the
elder tree growing in it had a fresh look at the old magpie nest. And
there was Mag herself, sitting on her pretty eggs under her roof of
thorny sticks! After suffering my presence for about two minutes she
slipped off and went away without a sound. Wishing her good luck I came
away, as I did not want to make her unhappy by too long a visit.

The magpie is extremely common in these parts although there are no
trees for them to breed in. You meet with him twenty times a day when
out walking. He flies up a distance ahead, rising vertically, and hovers
a moment to get a good look at you, then hastens away on rapidly-beating
wings and slopes off into the furze bushes, displaying his open
graduated tail. He haunts the homestead and is frequently to be seen
associating with the poultry; there are no pheasants here and no
gamekeepers to shoot him, and, as in Ireland, the people do not like to
injure though they do not love him.

If you chance to hear a bird note or phrase that is new to you in this
place you may be sure the magpie is its author. Like the jay he is an
inventor of new sounds and has a somewhat different language for every
part of the country. The loud brisk chatter, his alarm note, which
resembles the tremulous bleat of a goat, is always the same; but his
ordinary language, used in conversation, when he is with his mate or a
small party of friends, is curiously varied and full of surprises. It
was one of my amusements in genial days in winter when a confabulation
was in progress to steal as near as I could and sit down among the
bushes to listen.

On one such occasion, where the furze was very thick and high,
I discovered that the bushes all round me teemed with minute,
shadowy-looking bird-forms silently hopping and flitting about.
They were golden-crested wrens wintering in this treeless place in
considerable numbers. Some of the small boys I talked to in this
neighbourhood knew the bird as the "Golden Christian Wrennie"--a rather
pretty variant.

But the Golden Christian Wrennie is not _the_ wren--not the Cornish
wren; for there is a proper Cornish wren, even as there is a St. Kilda
wren, and as there is a native wren, or local race or _Troglodytes
parvulus_, in every county, in every village and farm-house and wood
and coppice and hedge in the United Kingdom. He is a home-keeping little
bird, and when you find him, summer or winter, in town or country, you
know that he is a native, that his family is a very old one in that part
and was probably settled there before the advent of blue-eyed man and
the dawn of a Bronze Age.

He is universal, and that gives one the idea that he is very evenly
distributed; but I had no sooner set foot in this "westest" part of all
England than I found the wren more common than in any other part of the
country known to me, and this greatly pleased me because of my love
of him. Indeed, it was the prevalence of the wren which made the West
Cornwall bird life seem very much to me, despite the fact that the best
species have been extirpated or driven away and that no peregrine or
chough or hoopoe, or other distinguished feathered stranger, can
return to these shores and not be instantly massacred by the sportsmen,
ornithologists and private collectors. But the common little wren is
admired and respected by every one, even by the philistines. It is not
that he seeks to ingratiate himself with us like the robin; he is the
very opposite of that friendly little creature, and indeed I like him as
much for his independence as for his other sterling qualities. You may
feed the birds every day in cold weather and have them gather in crowds
to gobble up your scraps, but you will not find the wren among them. He
doesn't want of your charity, and can get his own living in all seasons
and in all places, rough or smooth, as you will find if you walk round
the coast from St. Ives to Land's End or to Mount's Bay.

Not a furze clump, nor stone hedge, nor farm building, nor old ruined
tin-mine, nor rocky headland, but has its wren, and go where you will
in this half-desert silent place you hear at intervals his sharp strident
note; but not to welcome you. Your heavy footsteps have disturbed
and brought him out of his hiding-place to look at you and vehemently
express his astonishment and disapproval. And having done so he vanishes
back into seclusion and dismisses the fact of your existence from his
busy practical little mind. He is at home, but not to you. 'Tis the only
home he knows and he likes it very well, finding his food and roosting
by night and rearing his young just in that place, with fox and adder
and other deadly creatures for only neighbours. Such a mite of a bird
with such small round feeble wings and no more blood in him than would
serve to wet a weasel's whistle! Best of all it is to see him among the
rude granite rocks of a headland, living in the roar of the sea: when
the wind falls or a gleam of winter sunshine visits earth you will find
him at a merry game of hide-and-seek with his mate among the crags,
pausing from time to time in his chase to pour out that swift piercing
lyric which you will hear a thousand times and never without surprise at
its power and brilliance.

In these waste stony places, where the wren is common, another small
feathered creature was with me just as often--the anxious, irresolute
meadow pipit, or titlark, who is the very opposite in character to the
brisk, vigorous, positive little brown bird whose mind is made up and
who does everything straight off. Nevertheless he gave me almost as
much pleasure, only it was a somewhat different feeling--a pleasure of
a pensive kind with something of mystery in it. He did not sing, even on
those bright days or hours in January, which caused such silent ones as
the corn bunting and pied wagtail to break out in melody. The bell-like
tinkling strain he utters when soaring up and dropping to earth is for
summer only: it is that faint fairy-like aerial music which you hear
on wide moors and commons and lonely hillsides. In winter he has no
language but that one sharp sorrowful little call, or complaint, the
most anxious sound uttered by any small bird in these islands. It is a
sound that suits the place, and when the wind blows hard, bringing the
noise of the waves to your ears, and the salt spray; when all the sky is
one grey cloud, and sea mists sweep over the earth at intervals blurring
the outline of the hills, that thin but penetrative little sad call
seems more appropriate than ever and in tune with Nature and the mind.
The movements, too, of the unhappy little creature have a share in
the impression he makes; he flings himself up, as it were, before
your footsteps out of the brown heath, pale tall grasses and old dead
bracken, and goes off as if blown away by the wind, then returns to you
as if blown back, and hovers and goes to this side, then to that, now
close to you, a little sombre bird, and anon in appearance a mere dead
leaf or feather whirled away before the blast. During the uncertain
flight, and when, at intervals, he drops upon a rock close by, he
continues to emit the sharp sorrowful note, and if you listen it
infects your mind with its sadness and mystery. You can imagine that
the wind-blown feathered mite is not what it seems, a mere pipit, but
a spirit of that place in the shape and with the voice of a mournful
little bird--a spirit that cannot go away nor die, nor ever forget the
unhappy things it witnessed in pity and terror long ages gone when an
ancient people, or a fugitive remnant, gathered at this desolate end of
all the land--a tragedy so old that it was forgotten on the earth and
those who had part in it turned to dust thousands of years ago.

[Illustration: 0126]




CHAPTER IX THE PEOPLE AND THE FARMS

_A primitive type--Unintelligible speech--The little dark man--The
prevailing type blonde--The Dawn in Britain---Cornish speech and
"naughty English"--Two modes of speaking--Voice and intonation--Chapel
singing--The farmer's politics--Preachers and people--Life on a
farm--Furze as fuel--Food--Healthy and happy children--Children in
procession--The power of the child._

|ONE afternoon I watched the gambols and mock fights of three ravens
among the big boulder stones at a spot a little way back from the cliff,
and seeing a man occupied in pulling up swedes in a field not very far
off, I thought I would go and speak to him about the birds, as they
haunted the spot regularly and he would perhaps be able to tell me if
they ever bred in the neighbouring cliffs. I knew the man by sight, also
that he was a native of the place and never in his fifty odd years had
been further than about ten miles away from it. He called himself
a "farmer," being the tenant of a small holding of about a dozen or
fifteen acres and a small cottage which was the "farm-house." He was a
curious-looking undersized man with a small narrow wizened face,
small cunning restless eyes of no colour, and reddish yellow eyebrows,
perpetually moving up and down. He reminded me of an orangutan and at
the same time of a wild Irishman of a very low type.

I talked to him about the ravens, pointing to them, and he, presently
recalling I dare say some exciting adventure he had met with in
connection with the birds, began to tell me the strangest story I had
ever listened to. It was absolutely unintelligible; the strangeness was
in his manner of delivering it. He grinned and he grimaced, swinging his
long thin sinewy monkey-like arms about, jerking his body, and
making many odd gestures, while pouring out a torrent of gibberish,
interspersed with Caffre-like clicks and other inarticulate sounds;
then throwing himself back he stared up at me, wrinkling his forehead,
winking and blinking, as much as to say "Now what do you think of that?"

"Yes, just so; dear me! very wonderful!" I returned; and then, after
treating me to another torrent, he threw himself back on his swedes and
I walked off. I discovered that this little man, who, when excitedly
talking and gesticulating, was hardly like a human being, was one of
a type which is not excessively rare on this coast. He differed from
others of his kind whom I met only in his reddish colour. The proper
colour of this kind is dark. On the St. Ives beach I one day saw another
specimen. He was in the middle of an altercation with a carter who was
loading his cart with dogfish which the fish-buyers had turned up their
noses at and so it had to be sold for manure. He was in a state of
intense excitement, dancing about on the sands and discharging a torrent
of wild gibberish at the other. I remarked to a young Cornishman who was
standing there looking on and listening, that I could not understand
a word and could hardly believe that all the man's jabber really meant
anything. "I can understand him very well," said the young man: "he is
talking _proper Cornish_."

At Sennen Cove I came upon yet another example: he too was in a dancing
rage when I first saw him, chattering, screeching and gesticulating more
like a frenzied monkey than a human being. The man he was abusing was a
big stolid fisherman, who stood with his hands in his trouser pockets,
a clay pipe in his mouth, perfectly unmoved, like a post: it was a
wonderful contrast and altogether a very strange scene.

This small, dark, peppery man, who is found throughout the country, and
whose chief characteristics appear to be intensified in West Cornwall,
is no doubt a survival or, more properly speaking, a reversion to a very
ancient type in this country. At all events, there is a vast difference
between this little blackie or brownie of Bolerium and the prevailing
type. The man of the ordinary type is medium-sized and has a broad
head, high cheek-bones, light hair, and grey-blue eyes. The "recognised
authorities" are not, I imagine, wholly to be trusted on the question of
colour: the southern half of Hampshire appears to me more of a dark or
black province than Cornwall. Probably the author of the noble epic,
_The Dawn in Britain_, was misled by the anthropologists when he made
his Cornishmen who came to the war against the Roman a dark people:

               Who came, strange island people, to the war,

               Men bearded, bearing moon-bent shields, unlike,

               Of a dark speech, to other Britons are

               Belerians, workers in the tinny mines

               Of Penrhyn Gnawd, which Bloody Foreland named,

               Decit their king upleads them, now in arms.

At Calleva, in which the Romans were besieged by the Britons, in Book
xiii, and again in Books xv and xvi, after the tremendous battle of the
Thames, when the army of Claudius was opposed in its march to Verulam,
and, finally, at Camulodunum, we meet with this contingent:

               When swart Belerians, on blue Briton's part...

               Who midst moon-shielded swart Belerians rides

                        Is Decit....

               Halts swart Belerian king, lo, on his spear...

               Therefore have swart Belerians crowned his brow

                        With holy misselden.

This is odd in one to whom the Celts were a tall, fair-skinned, god-like
people, and who, worshipping their memory, abhors and hurls curses at
all the nations and races of the earth that were at enmity with them,
from the conquering Romans back even to the little fierce, shrill,
brown-skinned Iberians, "greedy as hawks," who had the temerity to
oppose them even as in our own day the little yellow Japanese opposed
the white and god-like Muscovites.

[Illustration: 9130]

For to his mind the events he relates are true, and the mighty men he
brings before us, from Brennus to Caractacus, as real as any Beduin he
hobnobbed with in Arabia Deserta. Perhaps it is even odder, with regard
to this epic, which is undoubtedly the greatest piece of literature the
young century has produced, that it should be the work of an Irishman,
and from beginning to end a glorification of the Celts, yet wholly and
intensely Saxon in its character, with no trace of that special quality
which distinguishes the Celtic imagination.

To return. The speech of the Cornish people is another subject about
which erroneous ideas may be got from reading. Norden wrote that the
native language was declining in his day, and adds: "But of late the
Cornishe men have much conformed themselves to the use of the Englishe
toung and their Englishe is equall to the beste." There is no doubt that
he was speaking of the gentry, but hasty makers of books who came after
him took it to mean that the people generally spoke good English, and
this statement has been repeated in books down to the present day.
Andrew Borde, in his Bohe of the Introduction of Knoledge, 1542, wrote:
"In Cornwall is two speeches, the one is naughty Englische, and the
other Cornysshe speeche." The last has been long dead, and dead will
remain in spite of the efforts of one enthusiast who hopes to revive it
and has actually written a sonnet in Cornish just to prove that it can
be done; but "naughty Englische" is still generally spoken, though very
much less naughty than the "proper Cornish" which I have described as
quite unintelligible to a stranger.

It was explained to me by a gentleman, resident for many years in West
Cornwall, a student of the people, that they have two distinct ways of
speaking, especially in the villages along the coast and in places much
frequented by visitors. In speaking to strangers they enunciate their
words with deliberation so as to be understood, and those among them
who have a good deal of practice succeed very well; but among themselves
they speak in a hurried manner, slurring over or omitting half the
syllables in half the words, so that it is most difficult to follow
them. I am convinced from my own observation that he is right. I have
sat conversing with a knot of fishermen, and after a while become
silent, pretending to fall into a brown study while listening all the
time, and they, seeing me absorbed in my own thoughts, as they imagined,
have dropped quite naturally into their own familiar lingo.

Here is another instance. There was one cottage I always liked to visit
to sit for an hour with the family and sometimes have a meal with them
just for the pleasure of listening to the wife, a thin, active, voluble
woman, who was a remarkably good speaker, and what was even more to me,
a lover of all wild creatures--a rare thing in a Cornish peasant. Or
perhaps I should say all creatures save one--the adder. Once, she told
me, when she was a little girl she was running home over the furze-grown
hill from school when she came upon an adder in the act of devouring a
nestful of fledglings. She stood still and gazed, horror-stricken, as it
slowly bolted bird after bird, and then fled home crying with grief and
pain at what she had witnessed, and never from that day had she seen
or thought of an adder without shuddering. Now it almost invariably
happened that in relating her experiences she would become excited at
the most interesting part, and in her heat speak more and more rapidly
and change from plain understandable English to "naughty English" or
"proper Cornish," and so cause me to lose the very point of the story.
Tonkin, the Cornish historian, when the old language was well-nigh dead,
described the people's speech as a jargon "the peculiarity of which was
a striking uncertainty of the speaker as to where one word left off and
another began."

The voice is not musical, but in young people who have not lost the
quiet low manner of speaking acquired at school and gone back to the
original noisy gabble, it often sounds pleasant. There is an intonation,
or sing-song, which varies slightly in different localities: some fine
ears can tell you to which village or "church-town," as they say, a man
belongs by his intonation. As a rule it is a slight raising of the voice
at the last, and dwelling on it, and on any word in the sentence on
which the emphasis naturally falls, and is like singing. When you get
young people with fresh, clear voices talking together with animation,
the speech falls into a kind of recitative and has a rather pleasing
effect. But the voice appears to harden and grow harsh with years, and
acquires a disagreeable metallic quality. A good singer is, I imagine,
a great rarity. The loud and hearty singing in the chapels is rather
distressing. In a Bible Christian place of worship, when Baring Gould's
hymn "Onward, Christian soldiers," was being sung, I was almost deafened
by the way in which the congregation bellowed out the lines--

                   Hell's foundations tremble

                        At our shout of praise.

And small wonder, I thought, if any sense of harmony survives down
there!

Of speaking and singing I heard more than enough during my first winter
(1905-6), as it was a time of political agitation. The excitement was,
however, mostly in the towns. Fishermen and miners were almost to a man
on the Liberal side, led by their ministers, who were eagerly looking to
have their revenge on the Church; while those on the land were, despite
their Methodism, on the other side, but with small hopes of winning.
They appeared to be in a reticent and somewhat sullen humour: it was
hard to get a word out of them, but I one day succeeded with a farmer I
was slightly acquainted with. I found him in a field mending a gate, and
after telling him the news and guessing what his politics were, I teased
him with little mocking remarks about the way things electoral were
going, until he was thoroughly aroused, and burst out in a manner that
fairly astonished me. Yes, he was a Conservative, he angrily exclaimed.
Being on the land, what else could he be? Only a blind fool or a traitor
to his fellows could be anything different if he got his living from the
land. He didn't knaw the man as thought different to he. But they--the
farmers--were going to be beat, he knew well enough. 'Twas bound to be,
seeing the other side had the numbers. They had the town people--small
tradesmen, fishers, workmen and all them that passed their time leaning
against a wall with their hands in their pockets--the unemployed as they
was called now-days. We didn't use to call them _that!_ The Liberals
with their promises had got them on their side. What did they think
they'd get? To live without work? That pay would be better, clothes
and food cheaper--miners to get two pounds a week, or three, 'stead of
thirty shillings; a fisherman to get twice as much for his fish, so that
after a good catch he'd be able to sit down and rest for six months?
No more work for we! Yes, many expected that. Anyhow they'd all git
something because 'twas promised 'em--better pay, better times. But you
can't have something for nothing, can you? Who's to pay for it then?
They don't bother about that; 'twill have to come somehow--maybe from
the land. Yes, the land's to pay for everything! Did any of them town
idlers, them that worked a day or two once a week or month--did they
knaw what the land gave? Did they knaw what 'tis to git up before dawn
every day, Sundays as well, and work all day till after dark, all just
for a bare living? But you work the land, they'll say, you don't own
it--'tis the landlords we've got to get it out of. 'Twill come out of
the profits. Will it? That's just what I'd like to knaw. We pay a pound
or two an acre with all the rough and stones, and we pay tithes. And
what do the landlords git? There's rich and poor and big and little
among 'em, the same as in everything. If he owns a hundred thousand
acres he's well off, however little the land pays. But what if he owns
only a few small farms, like most of them in these parts--can he live
and bring up his sons to be anything better than labourers, or just what
we farmers are, out of it? If I owned this land myself and had to pay
all my landlord pays, I don't think I'd be much better off than I am
now. I'd have to work the same. What do they mean, then, by saying the
land will pay? I knaw--I'll tell you. It means that the land's here and
can't be hidden and can't be taken out of the country, and them who own
it and them that make their living out of it can be robbed better than
anybody else. That's how them that are not on the land will get their
something for nothing.

What most interested me was the manner in which this discourse was
delivered. In conversation he had the hard metallic Cornish voice
without any perceptible intonation; now in his excitement he fell into
something like a chant, keeping time with hands and legs, swinging his
arms, striking his foot on the ground, and jerking his whole body up
and down. Even so might some Cornish warrior of the ancient days have
harangued his followers and tried to inspire in them a fury equal to his
own. Even the cows two or three fields away raised their heads and gazed
in our direction, wondering what the shouting was about.

As for the matter of his discourse, he expressed the feeling common
among the farming people--the fear of change was on them. The odd thing
is that the people generally, including miners, fishermen and others of
their class, are haters of innovation, even as the farmers are, which
does not promise them some material benefit, and there is no doubt that
in this case they did confidently expect some good thing, and it pleased
them to think their ministers were on their side. They knew that their
ministers were aiming at something which they cared very little about:
it was an alliance and nothing more. They are not dominated by their
ministers, and, excepting some of the local preachers, do not share
their malignant hatred of the Church. On the contrary I found it a usual
thing for the chapel people to go occasionally to church as well, and
many made it a practice to go every Sunday to the evening service. It is
also common for the chapel-goers to send for the vicar when in want of
spiritual aid. The minister often enough tells the applicant to go to
the vicar who is "paid to do it." I talked to scores of people about
the education question and could hardly find one in ten to manifest the
slightest interest in it. The people had no quarrel with the Church on
that question, although their ministers were preaching to them
every Sunday about it. These preachers were Scotchmen, Midlanders,
Londoners--anything but Cornishmen--and in most cases knew as much about
the Cornish as they did of the inhabitants of Mars. They knew what the
Methodist Society wanted and that was enough for them.

Now I cared little about all this political pother. While I listened and
could not avoid listening, I was like one who hears a military band with
loud braying of brass instruments and rub-a-dub of drums, but is at the
same time giving an attentive ear to some small sound issuing from
some leafy hiding-place in the vicinity--the delicate small warble of a
willow-wren, let us say. And the willow-wren in this case was the real
heart of the people, not all this imported artificial noise in the air.
That alone was what interested me; it was a relief to escape from the
ridiculous hubbub into one of the small farm-houses, to live with the
people in a house that never saw a newspaper, where the farmer and his
wife minded their farm and were very proud of getting the highest price
in the market for their butter.

Life on these small farms is incredibly rough. One may guess what it is
like from the outward aspect of such places. Each, it is true, has its
own individual character, but they are all pretty much alike in their
dreary, naked and almost squalid appearance. Each, too, has its own
ancient Cornish name, some of these very fine or very pretty, but you
are tempted to rename them in your own mind Desolation Farm, Dreary
Farm, Stony Farm, Bleak Farm, and Hungry Farm. The farm-house is a small
low place and invariably built of granite, with no garden or bush or
flower about it. The one I stayed at was a couple of centuries old, but
no one had ever thought of growing anything, even a marigold, to soften
its bare harsh aspect. The house itself could hardly be distinguished
from the outhouses clustered round it. Several times on coming back to
the house in a hurry and not exercising proper care I found I had made
for the wrong door and got into the cow-house, or pig-house, or a shed
ol some sort, instead of into the human habitation. The cows and
other animals were all about and you came through deep mud into the
living-room. The pigs and fowls did not come in but were otherwise free
to go where they liked.

[Illustration: 0139]

The rooms were very low; my hair, when I stood erect, just brushed the
beams; but the living-room or kitchen was spacious for so small a house,
and had the wide old open fireplace still common in this part of the
country. Any other form of fireplace would not be suitable when the fuel
consists of furze and turf.

[Illustration: 0141]

Here I had the feeling of being back in one of those primitive
cattle-breeding establishments, or estancias as they are called, on the
South American pampas, where every one, dogs and cats included, lived in
the big smoke-blackened kitchen by day, and the fuel was dried stalks of
Cardoon thistle and various other stout annuals, with dried cow-dung for
peat, and greasy strong-smelling bones of dead horses, cows and sheep.
It was like an illusion, so that I was continually on the point of
addressing the children playing on the floor in Spanish, or in gaucho
lingo, to name every dog "Pechicho" and call "Mees-mees" instead of
"Pussy-pussy" to a cat.

By day I was out of doors, wet or fine, but in the evening--and it was
when evenings were longest--I sat with the others and gazed into the
cavernous fireplace and basked and shivered in the alternating bursts of
heat and cold. As a rule, the round baking-pot was on its polished stone
on the hearth, with smouldering turves built up round it and heaped
on the flat lid. In some parts of Cornwall they have good peat, called
"pudding turves," which makes a hot and comparatively lasting fire. In
the Land's End district they have only the turf taken from the surface,
which makes the poorest of all fires, but it has to serve. By and by the
big home-made loaf would be done, and when taken out would fill the room
with its wholesome smell--one is almost tempted to call it fragrance.
But to make a blaze and get any warmth furze was burnt. On the floor at
one side of the hearth there was always a huge pile of it; the trouble
was that it burnt up too quickly and took one person's whole time to
keep the fire going. This onerous task was usually performed by the
farmer's wife, who, after an exceedingly busy day beginning at five
o'clock in the morning, appeared to regard it as a kind of rest or
recreation. Standing between the hearth and pile she would pick up the
top branch, and if too big with all its load of dry spines she would
divide it, using her naked hands, and fling a portion on to the hearth.
In a few moments the dry stuff would ignite and burn with a tremendous
hissing and crackling, the flames springing up to a height of seven or
eight feet in the vast hollow chimney. For a minute or two the whole big
room would be almost too hot and lit up as by a flash of lightning. Then
the roaring flames would sink and vanish, leaving nothing but a bed of
grey ashes, jewelled with innumerable crimson and yellow sparks, rapidly
diminishing. Then I would begin to think that "sitting by the fire" in
this land was a mockery, that I was not warmed and made happy like
a serpent in the sun, but was overcome from time to time by gusts of
intolerable heat and light, with intervals of gloom that was almost
darkness and bitter cold between. I should not have cared to spend the
entire bitterly-cold winter of 1906-7 with no better fuel, but for a
time I liked it well enough; it was a pleasure to feel the stirring to
life of old instincts, to recover the associations which fire has for
one that has lived in rude lands; and then, too, the glorious effect
of the blaze at its greatest was intensified by the cold and gloom that
preceded and followed it.

As I wished to know how they lived I had the ordinary fare and found
it quite good enough for any healthy person: pork fattened on milk and
home-cured; milk (from the cow) and Cornish clotted cream, which is
unrivalled; sometimes a pasty, in which a little chopped-up meat is
mixed with sliced turnip and onion and baked in a crust, and finally the
thin Cornish broth with sliced swedes which give it a sweetish taste.
Then there was the very excellent home-made bread, and saffron cake, on
which the Cornish child is weaned and which he goes on eating until the
last day of his life. With every meal they drink tea. They are very
good eaters: one day the farmer's wife told me that each one of her six
little children consumed just double what I did. And the result of this
abundance and of an open-air life in that wet and windy country is that
the people are as healthy and strong and long-lived as any in the world.

The children are wonderful. You may go to village after village and look
in vain for a sickly or unhappy face among them. It is true you do not
find the very beautiful children one often sees in both England and
Ireland, the angelic children with shining golden hair, eyes of violet
or pure forget-me-not blue and exquisite flesh tints, nor do you
find children with so much charm. They are, generally speaking, more
commonplace; the wonder is in their uniform high state of well-being.
One of the prettiest scenes I ever beheld was a procession on Empire
Day, May 24, of all the school children in Penzance. They were all, even
to the poorest, prettily dressed, and those of a good number of schools,
Catholic, Methodist and Anglican, had very beautiful distinctive
costumes. As I watched the mile-long procession going by in Market Jew
Street, every face aglow with happy excitement, I began to search in
the ranks for one that was thin and sad-looking or pale or anæmic, but
failed to find such a one.

We have been told by an English traveller in Japan that children are
best off in that land where a mother is never seen to slap or heard to
scold her child, and where a child is never heard to cry. Now a Japanese
visitor to England has informed us that it is not so, that mothers do
sometimes slap or scold a child, and children do sometimes cry. I can
say the same of West Cornwall, and nevertheless believe that compared
with other parts of England it is a children's paradise. A common
complaint made by English residents is that the children are not taught
to know their place--that they do just what they like. "When my
children want to go anywhere," a mother said to me, "they do not ask my
permission: but they are very good--they always tell me where they are
going. I do not forbid them because I know they would go just the same."
The schoolmaster in a village I stayed at told me as an instance of the
power the children have that one morning on passing a cottage he heard
sounds of crying and voices in loud argument and went in to ascertain
the cause. He found the man and his wife and their two little
children--Billy the boy and Winnie the girl, aged nine--all in great
distress. The man had received a letter from his cousin in Constantine
to say that the village festival was about to take place and inviting
him to go to him on a two or three days' visit and to take Billy. He
wanted to go and so, of course, did Billy, and now Winnie had said that
she must be taken too! In vain they had reasoned with her, pointing
out that she could not go because she had not been included in the
invitation; she simply said that if Billy went she would go, and from
that position they could not move her. The result was that the visit
to Constantine had to be abandoned; the good man sadly informed the
schoolmaster a day or two later that Winnie had refused to let them go
without her! The odd thing, my informant said, was that there was no
attempt on the parents' part to put the child down. The children, he
said, are masters of the situation in these parts: the way they lorded
it over their parents had amazed him when he first came from a Midland
district to live among them.

But I must say for the little ones that they do not as a rule
abuse their authority. They are so healthy, and have such happy and
affectionate dispositions, that they do behave very well. Winnie was an
exceptionally naughty little maid and required some such drastic method
as that which Solomon advocated, but for the generality the system in
favour is after all the one best suited to them.

[Illustration: 0147]




CHAPTER X AN IMPRESSION OF PENZANCE

_Value of first impressions--Market day in Penzance--Cornish cows--The
main thoroughfare--Characteristics--Temperance in drink--A foreigner
on English drinking habits--Irish intemperance--The craving for
drink--False ideas--Wales--Methodism and temperance--Carew's
testimony--Conclusion._

|PLACES are like faces--a first sight is almost invariably the one
that tells you most. When the first sharp, clear impression has grown
blurred, or is half forgotten or overlaid with subsequent impressions,
we have as a rule lost more than we have gained: it is hardly too much
to say in a majority of instances that the more familiar a place becomes
to us the less well we know it. At all events we have ceased to know
it in the same way; we no longer vividly, consciously, see it in its
distinctive character.

Here it must be explained that by "place" several things are meant--the
appearance of the buildings, if it be a town or village; its scenery
and physical conditions generally; and, finally, its inhabitants, their
physique, dress, speech and character.

Now that I know Penzance fairly well, having visited it a dozen or
twenty times, occasionally staying a week or longer in it, I am glad to
be able to go back to my very first impression, which, fortunately, I
did not leave wholly to memory.

The first visit was on a Tuesday, which is market day in Penzance,
always the best day on which to visit a country town if one is
interested in the people and their domestic animals. Although in
midwinter, the day was exceptionally mild and very fine, and arriving
early, I spent some hours in strolling about the streets, peeping
into the churches, and visiting the public gardens, the sea-front and
cattle-market. The town itself, despite its fine situation on Mount's
Bay, with the famous castle on the island hill, opposite Marazion,
on one hand and the bold coast scenery by Newlyn and Mousehole on the
other, interested me as little as any country town I have seen. Streets
narrow and others narrower still, some straight, some very crooked,
with houses on either side, mostly modern, all more or less mean or
commonplace in appearance. The market, too, was curiously mean, and the
animals poor; it was a surprise to see such cattle in a district which
is chiefly dependent on dairy produce. The cows were small, mostly lean
and all in an incredibly rough and dirty condition, their haunches,
and in many instances half their coats, covered with an old crust of
indurated mud and dung. The farmers do nothing to improve their cattle
and are not only satisfied to go on keeping these small beasts of no
particular breed--a red and white animal which looks like a degenerated
Jersey--but it is customary to allow them to breed a year too soon.

[Illustration:0149]

This, however, is not a question to dogmatise about; one would certainly
wish to see the beasts better cared for in the winter months and brought
to market in a less filthy state, but I doubt that any improved breed
would flourish in the conditions in which these animals exist in the
small dairy farms on the stony moors in this rough unsheltered district.
The cow of the Land's End country is, in some degree, a product of the
place and in harmony with its environment, like the Land's End fox and
badger.

At noon the market was over, but the town continued full of people until
long after dark, the main thoroughfare, Market Jew Street, and one or
two streets adjoining, being thronged with farmer folk and people
from the villages who had come in to sell their produce and do their
shopping. Carriers' carts stood in rows by the side of the pavements,
and as in other market towns each had brought in its little cargo
of humanity, mostly women with sun-browned faces, all in that rusty
respectable dowdy black dress which is universal in rural England and
would make an ugly object of any woman in the world. Again, as is the
custom in market towns, the thoroughfare was the place where the people
congregated to meet and converse with their friends and relations. This
meeting with friends appeared to be a principal object of a visit to
Penzance on market day. It was a sort of social function, and the longer
I remained in the street, sauntering about, watching the people and
listening to endless dialogues, the more I was interested. Not only was
this the healthiest-looking crowd I had ever seen in a town, without a
sickly or degraded face in it, but it was undoubtedly the most cheerful,
and at the same time the most sober. The liveliness of the crowd,
its perpetual flow of hilarious talk, its meetings and greetings and
handshakings, and its numerous little groups in eager good-humoured
discussion, made me very watchful, but down to the end I was unable
to detect the slightest sign of inebriety. It was a new and curious
experience to find myself in a considerable gathering of rustics who
had succeeded in getting through their day away from home so pleasantly
without the aid of intoxicants.

Some of the town police I conversed with on the subject during the day
assured me there was very little drinking going on; and that on the last
occasion of the great annual fair of Corpus Christi, which lasts two
or three days, when the people of all the country round are gathered in
Penzance and a good deal of merry-making goes on, they had not a single
case of drunkenness. The policemen, abstainers themselves they informed
me, believed the people were sober because they were mostly church and
chapel goers and had been brought up to regard intemperance as a great
defect in a man and a great sin.

This explanation of the soberness of the Cornish people, especially in
the west part, is, I found, the usual one: it is short and easy to carry
about in the brain, and a policeman or any one you question on the point
is as ready to supply you with it as he would be to give you a match to
light your pipe. Religion may be one cause, but I imagine that another
and a much more important one is to be traced in the character of this
people.

I here recall a striking explanation of the drinking habit in England
given me by an independent witness and a very keen observer. He was an
Argentine of an old native family. I first knew him as a young student;
he rose afterwards to a very high place in the government of his
country, and a few years ago, while on a visit to England, he looked me
up and we renewed our old friendship.

His idea about drinking in England was that it was indulged in to remedy
a defect in us, a certain slowness or dullness of thought or feeling
from which we desired at times to escape. He gave the following
illustration. Two British workmen, old friends, meet by chance after a
long interval and clasp hands delightedly and each asks the other how
he is. One says "Just so so" or "Pretty well," the other says "Mustn't
grumble." They appear, then, to have got to the end of their powers of
speech, yet are conscious that there is more to be said if they are
ever to get back into the old comfortable intimacy. Suddenly one has
an inspiration and proposes a drink. The other agrees with a sense of
relief, and they incontinently repair to the nearest public, where,
after a glass or two, what they desired and tried to get but could not
is at once theirs: their tongues are loosed, they laugh in pure joy at
their new-found freedom and ability to express themselves; they talk of
their work, their families, of a hundred things they had forgotten but
remember now, and are glad to feel in sympathy with each other.

Now, he continued, we of another race and disposition in our country
when we meet an old friend, although it may not be very long since we
last saw him, feel no such restraint, but at once the joy of meeting
him sets us off. The pleasure is stimulus enough of itself; it sends
the blood spinning through our brains, and we are, in fact, almost
intoxicated by it. To take alcohol is unnecessary, and would, indeed, be
very foolish.

So far my Argentine friend, and whether he was right or wrong it struck
me at Penzance that the naturally lively disposition of Cornishmen,
their quick feeling and responsiveness, was the chief cause of their
temperance in drink. This made it easy for them to practise temperance;
it made it possible for friend to meet friend and spend the day without
an artificial aid to cheerfulness.

It is true that the Irish, racially related to the Cornish and
resembling them in disposition, are not a sober people; on this point I
will only venture to suggest that their love of whisky and ether may not
result from the same cause as the Anglo-Saxon's love of drink. Probably
their misery has got a great deal to do with it, for just as whisky
or beer will unfreeze the currents of the soul in two stolid English
friends and set them flowing merrily, so in men of all races will
alcohol lift them above themselves and give them a brief happiness.

It may seem odd to quote the Rev. R. J. Campbell in this connection,
but I find in a recent pronouncement of his a curiously apposite remark
about drunkenness. "The man," he says, "who got dead drunk last night
did so because of the inspiration in him to break through the barriers
of his limitations, to express himself and realize the more abundant
life." We need not follow him any further in his quaint contention that
sin is, after all, nothing but a spasmodic effort of the sinner to reach
to or capture higher things--a "quest of God" as he curiously puts it.
It is nothing but a prolonged and somewhat shrill echo of a wiser or a
saner man's thoughts. "The sway of alcohol over mankind," says
Professor William James in his _Varieties of Religious Experience_, "is
unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties
of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry
criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates and
says, No; drunkenness expands, unites and says, Yes.... It brings its
votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core. It makes
him for the moment one with truth... it is part of the deeper mystery
and tragedy of life that whiffs and gleams of something that we
immediately recognise as excellent should be vouchsafed to so many of
us only in the fleeting earlier phases of what in its totality is so
degrading a poisoning."

Mr. Campbell's striver after the higher life who got dead drunk last
night is brother to the savage. It is stated by no less an authority
on the drink question than Dr. Archdall Reid that there is in man a
passion, an instinct, for alcohol, and that the savage has a craving for
drink. There is no such craving. The natural happiness of the savage,
as I know him, is in hunting and fighting; and in the intervals of those
stirring pursuits he has a somewhat dull, lethargic existence. Alcohol
produces the state of mind he is in when occupied with the chase or
in raiding and fighting. It is a joyful excitement, a short cut to
happiness and glory which he will take at every opportunity. They will
even sell their weapons and the skins that cover them for a little of
this happiness; but when there is no more of it to be had they return
to their normal life, and think no more about it unless the poison has
permanently or very seriously injured them. One effect on the poisoned
man, savage or civilised, is that "craving", or mad thirst, with which,
Dr. Reid imagines, Nature has cursed her human children.

We have now got a good distance away from the subject we started with;
but I have no intention of returning to Penzance. That town interested
me solely as a place where Cornishmen may be seen and studied. To go
back a little further in time to my first impressions of Cornwall, I
was struck, as most persons are on a first visit, with its unlikeness to
other parts of England. You find the unlikeness, not only in the aspect
of the country, but in the people too; you would hardly feel that
you had gone so far from the England you know if you had crossed the
Atlantic. The differences are many and great, but in this chapter I am
concerned with only one--the greater temperance of the people: indeed,
my impression of Penzance was given mainly to serve as an introduction
to this subject. It is a very important one. Our judges and magistrates
are always telling us that most of the crimes committed in this country
are due to drink. The case of Cornwall certainly favours that view: it
is, if the statistics are accepted as showing the true state of things,
the most sober and has the cleanest record in the land. The Devonians
are not a vicious people; they compare well enough with most counties,
and they are next-door neighbours to the Cornish; yet the indictable
offences in Devon are about double per thousand of the population to
those of Cornwall. What is the reason of this? Why are the Cornish more
temperate than others?

I am sorry I ever wasted an hour over a book on Cornwall with the idea
that it would be helpful to me. The time would have been more profitably
spent if I had stood with my hands in my pockets watching a sparrow
carry up straws to its nesting-hole under the eaves; or, better still,
if I had talked to a child or an old man in some village street. To
read is to imbibe false ideas, and in the end, if you are capable of
observing for yourself and care anything about the matter, you are put
to the trouble of ridding yourself of them.

When the Penzance policemen--abstainers and religious men
themselves--gave me a reason for the people's soberness they were
telling me what they had been taught, and I accepted it as probably
true. I too had read that statement and here was a confirmation of it!
It is a great satisfaction, a relief, to have our problems solved for
us. Blessings on the man who runs out before us to remove some obstacle
from the path!

But the relief was not for long: doubts began to assail me. What the
good policemen had said was what the Methodists have been saying in
their writings these hundred years or longer: they are saying it now,
all the time, and believe it because it flatters them, and poor weak
humanity is ever credulous of a flattering falsehood.

One day, a few miles from Penzance, I met a young coastguardsman and
had a nice long talk with him, in the course of which he gave me his
impression of the country. For he was not a native and had not long been
in Cornwall; he came from South Wales where he had been stationed two
or three years. The people of that place--I will not mention the
locality--were, he said, horrible to live with, degraded and brutish
beyond what he could have imagined possible in any civilised
country. They were drunkards, fighters, dreadfully profane, and as to
lechery--called _immorality_ in the journals and blue-books--no woman
could go out after dark, or by day into any lonely place, without danger
of assault. The change to West Cornwall was so great that for several
weeks he could not realise it; he could not believe that the people were
all sober and decent and friendly in disposition as he had been assured.
When he spied a man coming along the road his impulse was to lower his
eyes or turn his face away to avoid seeing a brutalised countenance.
He always expected to hear some obscene expression or a torrent of
profanity from every stranger he met. Even now, after some months in
this new clean land, he had not grown quite accustomed to regard every
one, stranger or not, as a being just like himself, one he could freely
address and feel sure of receiving friendly pleasant words in return.

It was interesting to hear the coastguardsman's story because of his
feelings in the matter and what the change to Cornwall meant to him.
That he was right in his facts we know. We know, for instance, that
just as Cornwall is the cleanest county, so some of the Welsh
counties--especially in the coalmining districts--are the foulest. Yet
the Welsh are Celts too and Methodists of a hundred and fifty years
standing! They are, in fact, the truer Methodists if we consider what
that creed is and that its most essential point is that there can be no
salvation without a sudden conversion, with or without the accompaniment
of groanings, shriekings, and other manifestations of the kind. But what
are the facts of the case as to the condition of Cornwall, with regard
to drunkenness, before its conversion to Methodism? They are not so
easily got as one may think. There is plenty of material, and any
one with a preconceived opinion on the question would doubtless find
something to confirm him in it. I had no opinion, and my sole desire was
to find out the truth. My first superficial study of the question made
me a believer in the claim made by the Methodists, but it did not bear
a closer investigation. What I found was that when tin-mining was in a
highly prosperous state and the population of the mining centres vastly
greater than it is now there was a good deal of intemperance among the
miners; but there is nothing to show that they were as degraded as the
Welsh of to-day. It is also indisputable that Wesley's preaching had a
profound effect on the tin-miners. That is the most that can be said.
That the Methodism invented after Wesley's death and imposed on his
followers in his name--the name of one who abhorred Dissent--is the
cause of the temperance of the Cornish people generally there is no
evidence to show, and no reason to believe. On the contrary there is
very good reason for disbelief.

The Cornish people are incomparably better off now, so far as material
comforts go, than they were in the last half of the sixteenth century,
when Richard Carew wrote his _Survey of Cornwall_; but there have been
no really great, no radical changes--no transformations, as in so many
other parts of Britain. The life of to-day is very much like the old
life, and the people now are like their forefathers of three centuries
ago as described by Carew. He pointed out that the tin-mines were a
great evil--the curse of Cornwall, since it was impossible for the
miners to escape the abominable temptations to drink which were thrust
in their way. Every second house was a drinking-place, into which the
poor wretches were enticed to waste their earnings, with the result that
their families were in a chronic state of want. But the rural population
were in a very different case; those who worked on the land were indeed
poor, fared coarsely, dressed meanly and wore no shoes, but they were
sober and industrious and lived in decent homes, and their wives and
children were properly fed and clothed; so that in the end they were far
better off and happier than the workers in the mines.

So we arrive at the conclusion that the Cornish people are not, and
never have been, intemperate generally; for one reason, because they
are of a singularly happy disposition, lively and sociable, with a very
intense love of their families and homes; and, secondly, because of the
idyllic conditions in which they exist, and always have existed, in a
country thinly populated, without big towns, with the healthiest, most
equable and genial climate in Britain; and, best of all, isolated,
outside of and remote from civilisation with its feverish restlessness,
vices and dreadful problems.

[Illustration: 0161]




CHAPTER XI MANNERS AND MORALS

_Carew's Survey of Cornwall--Books on Cornwall--Excessive praise
and dispraise--Saxon and Celt--Charge of insincerity--"One-and-all"
spirit--Dishonesty--Untruthfulness--An Englishman's view of the
Welsh--The question of immorality--Cruelty to animals--Offences
unpunished--Cornish civilisation a "veneer"--Wrecking and what it
means--Sunday observance--Cornish and English consistency--Englishmen
who understand._

|AFTER having marched over the land, and waded through the sea, to
describe all the creatures therein, insensible and sensible, the course
of method summoneth me to discourse of the reasonable, to wit, the
inhabitants."

Thus said Richard Carew in his _Survey of Cornwall_, written at the end
of the sixteenth century. I have no course of method, nor any order
in which to record these impressions of rocks and waters and birds and
flowers, or any other thing, insensible or sensible; but now, after
having written one entire long chapter on the soberness of the Cornish
people, explaining the causes, as I conceive them, of this peculiar
state, I think it may be just as well to go on about the reasonable, to
wit the inhabitants, and endeavour to get a little nearer to a proper
understanding of them. And here I must modify what I said in my haste
about the worthlessness (to me) of all books on Cornwall, protesting
that my time would have been better spent in listening to the chirruping
of a cock sparrow than in reading them. Carew's book is a notable
exception, pleasant and profitable to read after three centuries, and,
if we exclude living authors, it may be described as the one very good
book ever written by a Cornishman.

Having said so much it strikes me as an odd fact that the boast Carew
made about his important and long-living book--that it was his very own,
or, to use his more picturesque expression, that he gathered the sticks
for the building of his poor nest--I, too, can make of this unimportant
work which may not have more years of life than the _Survey_ has had
centuries.

For impressions of nature one goes to nature--the visible world which
lies open before us; but when it comes to that other nature of the human
heart, half-hidden in clouds and mist and half-revealed in gleams of the
sun, one modestly looks to others for guidance and to the books which
have been written in the past. And of books there are plenty--histories,
topographies, guides, hand-books, tours, travels, itineraries, journeys
and journals, wherein are many useful facts originally collected very
long ago and carried on from book to book--facts about the pilchard
fishery, tin and tin-mining, geology and natural history, Cornish
crosses and cromlechs with other antiquities; also legends of saints
and giants and the happenings of a thousand years ago. But about the
reasonable, to wit the inhabitants, next to nothing, and that very
little as a rule misleading. It is mostly of a flattering description.

It is indeed curious to note that while those who have written on the
Cornish people almost invariably say the pleasantest things about them,
the English, or Anglo-Saxons, who live among them, the strangers who
reside permanently or for long periods within their gates, have a very
different opinion. The praise and the dispraise to my mind are equally
far from the truth; moreover, it is not difficult to discover the reason
of such widely divergent opinions. Those who visit the land to write a
book about it, or for some other purpose, but do not remain long enough
to know anything properly, are charmed and misled by the exceedingly
friendly and pleasant demeanour towards strangers which is almost
universal, seeing in it only the outward expression of divers delightful
qualities. Those who live with the people, if they happen to be Saxons,
discover that the friendliness is a manner, that when you penetrate
beneath it you come upon a character wholly un-Saxon, therefore of a
wrong description or an inferior quality. For it is a fact that the
Englishman is endowed with a very great idea of himself, of the absolute
rightness of his philosophy of life, his instincts, prepossessions, and
the peculiar shape and shade of his morality. He is, so to speak, his
own standard, and measures everybody from China to Peru by it, and those
who fall short of it, who have a somewhat different code or ideal, are
of the meaner sort of men which one expects to find outside of
these islands. It is undoubtedly a noble state of mind, befitting a
world-conquering people, and has served to make us respected, feared and
even disliked in other countries, but some small disadvantages and some
friction result from it at home, and one is that the lord of human kind
residing among inferior Celts finds himself out of harmony with the
people about him. He is not as a rule quick, but after a few months or
years in a place he begins to find his neighbours out, and they on their
side are not insensible of the change in his regard. He sees that they
have faults and vices which being unlike those of the English he finds
it hard to tolerate. Not only does he disapprove of them on this account
but he resents having been taken in. "You are charmed with this people,
you tell me! Wait till you have lived years with them as I have done and
know them as I do, then give me your opinion," they are accustomed to
say in their bitterness--the feeling which cannot but make a man unjust.

It is not easy or not pleasant to descend to particulars, but having
gone so far as to state the question it would hardly be fair not to
go further, although by so doing I shall most probably incur the
displeasure of both sides.

A common charge against the Cornish is a want of solidity or stability
of character. You cannot rely on them. You are constantly deceived by
their manner: they are the readiest of any people on earth to fall in
with your views and do exactly what you want. _But they don't do it_.
You may waste years or indeed your whole life in striving to make them
see things in your better way, and give them every instruction and make
them understand (for they are not stupid) how much more may be done by
following an improved method, and you will always be brought back to the
same old _We don't belong to do it that way_, and after a hundred or a
thousand trials you give it up in despair. Or you may take your defeat
philosophically (with a little added wormwood) and say that although
they are not stupid, their intelligence, like that of the lower animals,
is non-progressive.

Then as to the one-and-all spirit. This, I am assured on all hands, is
the veriest fiction, or at all events it is quite a different thing from
what it is usually supposed to be. The members of each little community
are as a fact more unfriendly and spiteful towards one another than is
the case in an English village: they are _one_ only when they make a
combined attack on some person who has been so unfortunate as to offend
everybody at the same time. So envious are they that every one hates to
see any benefit or gift bestowed on another. You must treat all alike;
you may not give a hundred of coals to the poorest, most suffering old
woman without exciting general ill-will, unless you are prepared to give
as much to every other old woman in the parish. They would rather the
old creature should be left to shiver in a fireless room. Nor must you
speak in praise of another: do not say to Mrs. Trevenna, what a nice,
or what a well-behaved, or pretty, or attractive child that is of your
sister or friend or neighbour, Mrs. Trevasgis, if you do not want to set
the Trevenna tongue wagging against both you and the Trevasgis woman.

These little uncharitablenesses--to describe them all in one word--are
universal in man or woman, perhaps in both, and being part of our nature
they probably have their uses: if they strike us more in the Cornish
than in our own people it is because of the difference of temperament
or disposition--because their feelings, good or bad, are more readily
excited and are expressed with less restraint.

That they are not truthful and not honest is another count in the
long indictment. With regard to honesty it is one I always hear with
surprise; for can it be said that we are as a people honest? Consider
the one matter of our food and drink--the amount of legislation we have
found necessary on the subject, the cost to the country of maintaining
a vast army of inspectors and analysts to prevent us from poisoning each
other for the sake of a small extra gain! Would any one in England give
me for love or money a glass of milk or beer, or a slice of bread and
butter, which would not seriously injure my health but for the fear of
the law? And after all we have done to protect ourselves we are assured
every day by the experts that we are living in a fool's paradise seeing
that dishonesty is so ingrained in us that it will always find out a way
to defeat our best efforts.

_This_ charge may then be dropped--for the present at all events.
When our moral condition has been properly examined and reported on by
travellers and missionaries from Thibet or some undiscovered country on
the other side of the Mountains of the Moon we may be in a position to
affirm that Cornwall is not as honest as, say, Middlesex.

But if honesty is or ought to be a painful subject, perhaps in
discussing the question of truthfulness we shall be able to make out a
better case and recover our self-esteem. Here we have it as it is
stated by one of my correspondents: "However bad the English commercial
morality may be, the average Englishman's word still stands for
something. When he lies he does so deliberately for some important
purpose. Some other races, including the Celts, appear to have a
different perception of truth, and to lie, as children do, readily and
gracefully, because lies and exaggerations are more interesting and
agreeable than plain truth. A difference of temperament: the Englishman
may be better or worse, but he knows where he is and resents being
fooled."

This reminds me of the experience of a young friend of mine, a pure
Englishman, exceptionally intelligent, and so sympathetic and adaptive
that he is happy with all sorts of people and they with him. From
boyhood he has lived in Wales, a somewhat rambling life, in towns,
villages and farm-houses, and his playmates, fellow-students and
companions have been natives. Yet he assures me that he has never been
able to feel himself one of them, and never been able to see anything
eye to eye with even his most intimate and dearest friends of that race.
It all seems to come to an ineradicable difference of mind in the two
races. There is no better and no worse, and the only quarrel is when any
one, Saxon or Celt, is offended at another's inability to see eye to eye
with him, regarding it as a bad habit which ought to be overcome, or a
sheer piece of perversity on his part.

Then we have the complicated question of morality, or rather of
"immorality," by which some journalists, authors and compilers of
blue-books mean sexual intercourse unsanctified by marriage. Norden, who
wrote nigh on three centuries before the nice modern mind invented a
new meaning for an old word, described it as the "sweet synn" which
was regarded as venial in Cornwall. But Norden spoke of the gentry;
the manners and morals of what he described as the "baser sort of
men," including rustics, miners, mechanics, farmers and yeomen, did
not interest his lofty mind. But the sweet sin was also common among
Norden's "baser sort of men," and exists to-day as it did in the past,
and as it exists in the Principality, and perhaps in Ireland, where the
power and vigilance of the priests are now able to keep it dark. It is
really not so much a vice as a custom of the country, perhaps of the
race, seeing that the illicit intercourse usually ends in marriage. It
has been said that in Cornwall matrimony is the result of maternity. For
it must be borne in mind that I am speaking only of Cornwall.

[Illustration: 0169]

We have seen in the last chapter how it is in Wales, in some of the
mining districts; but these bestial developments are not known and have
probably never existed in the duchy. It is true that some poor women are
left to bear their burden alone, and that their frail sisters who have
had better fortune are as ready as others to persecute them, but the
proportion of these unhappy ones is really less than in very many
English villages.

It is of the villages and small towns I speak: the towns are mostly
very small; but as population increases with the revival of the mining
industry (the curse of the country "from ancientie") the extraordinary
liberty which young women are allowed, or have taken for themselves, and
their pleasant ways with men may result in a troublesome problem in the
larger centres.

It is said of the Cornish, as it has been said of the Irish and of
Celtic people generally, that they are cruel. I doubt if they are more
cruel than others if we restrict the word to its proper meaning--the
infliction of pain for the pleasure of it; but there is a great deal of
barbarity of the kind one sees in Spanish and Italian countries which
results from temper. The Cornish, like the Spanish, are passionate and
when anything goes wrong they are apt to wreak their fury on the poor
unresisting beast--cow, calf, horse, donkey or sheep. I have witnessed
many shocking acts of this kind which it would be too painful to me to
have to describe, and in discussing this subject with others, some of
them Cornishmen who naturally love their people and are anxious to see
them in the most favourable light, they have confessed to me that this
kind of brutality is very common; that it is the greatest blot on the
Cornishman's character and a constant cause of pain to persons of
a humane disposition. What to me makes it peculiarly painful is the
knowledge that the man I have witnessed horribly ill-treating some
patient dumb beast, and hated and wished that I had had the power to
annihilate him--this very man, his fit of fury over, would prove himself
a genuine Cornishman, a very pleasant fellow, temperate, religious,
hospitable, a good husband, devoted to his children.

Celtic cruelty, Tennyson said, was due to want of imagination. He was
speaking of the Irish, who are not supposed to be without that faculty.
Whether or not the Cornish have it is another question, but it may be
that Celtic cruelty, like the Spanish, is due rather to a drop of
black blood in the heart--an ancient latent ferocity which comes

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