It was unusual for the early Christians to order the destruction of monuments of this kind. As a rule they accepted and turned them to account. We have examples of this in the chapel at Porthcurnow, one of those very early buildings, formed of a double square, such as lie hidden among the shifting sands of Perran and Gwithian, and which was built on a spot already sacred as a place of burial; while on Chapel Carn Brea, which rises to a height of 660 ft., with Bartine at its shoulder still higher, is a cairn which held the bones of a Stone Age chieftain. Above them was a dolmen, and above that relics of British and Roman times, the whole being crowned by a Christian oratory!
It is hardly a matter for surprise if the people who dwell among these relics of the immemorial past still retain some of the superstitions of their forefathers, if their wells still have miraculous qualities and the crickstone a strange virtue. To them witches are as real as wreckers, and they cannot believe that the "little people"—once perhaps inhabiting those subterranean passages and huts—are gone for certain, and for ever. Get on the right side of an old miner and he will tell you of the "nuggies," of their silver anvils and their parlours, of how he has heard their little picks at work, and of how he has hoped all his life to one day catch sight of a nuggy slipping into its parlour, when he will, of course, follow and "strike it rich."
The housewife, on persuasion, may be got to tell how when she (or her mother) went in the morning to fill the kibble at the well she saw the pisky stealing away over the dewy fields by the first grey glimmer of light. Possibly he had taken eggs from her hen-roost, or if she were a wise woman and had baked him a hearth cake and left with it a sup of milk, he had perhaps "redded up" the place for her. It would be a matter of give-and-take, but the people in the low grey houses, with their thick walls and stone-held thatch, would be able to more than guess which mound it was into which the piskies vanished and which were the fairy rings about which they danced at dusk or in the moonlight. So wild was the country and so much does one piece of granite look like another that there were hiding-places in plenty, nooks that at a later date would be used by the smugglers and other law-breaking gentry, corners behind which the small race could lurk when the larger, more dangerous humans came striding by. Over against these tales of the "little people" must be set the stories told by those little people themselves, the stories of the giants, of the bigger folk whose terrors they magnified a hundredfold that their babies might be thus persuaded to keep out of danger. And because after all there must have been intermarriage, the occasional courting of pisky and giant, both sets of stories have been handed down from one generation to another. The Cornish are not a booky folk, they have not produced a great literature, and even nowadays they read little but their Bibles. Such a people would be likely to remember and treasure up the stories handed down from mother to child. They are, moreover, very social. In the loneliest parts there is seldom an evening when the labourers do not drop in at each other's cottages for a "crack," and every now and then the soft deep voices utter a word that has dropped out of the common talk, but which for them still has its right meaning, and the fathers tell over again the stories their fathers told to them. Some of the stories have come to the surface and are known to the "foreigner" (as every one born east of the Tamar is called). We have, for instance, that of the Zennor mermaid, which has taken such hold on local thought that it is even carved upon a bench-end in the little grey church. It was the story of a squire's son who sang in the choir and sang so beautifully that Sunday by Sunday a mermaid (Cornish—merrymaid) crept up from the sea to hear him. Like Hans Andersen's story she had found her prince, but unlike that story she in the end persuaded him to go away with her; and as he never returned, the wiseacres shook their heads and thought of him as lying drowned under the blue waters.
The antiquities of this, the extreme west, and the resulting strange traditions and beliefs are not the only matter of interest in this part of the world. Superimposed upon the survivals of a far-off time are those of the last thousand and odd years when Cornwall was struggling with the disabilities of its exposed position, when the Danes fell on the coasts burning and harrying, and corsairs carried off the poor fishermen and sold them as slaves. In 1635 a Turkish pirate ship was brought nolens volens into St. Ives Bay, and the peaceful folk, not immediately recognising her build, were surprised to hear sounds as of guns and firing. The firing was not at those on shore, it was in fact entirely confined to those on board, and it was as if the ship were divided against herself. In the end the truth appeared. The pirate had captured three small vessels of Looe and Fowey and seized their crews. These men, however, were not of a slavish kind. Rising in a body, they knocked the captain overboard, drove the Turks below and set sail for St. Ives. Having a fair wind they made it safely; though the pirates, also a hearty folk, spent their time firing at them through the timbers of the deck.
Wesley
We warrant those pirates had much the same reception at the hands of the St. Ives men as was dealt out to John Wesley when, in course of time, that small neat gentleman made his way into the district. The Cornish seem to have been—let us use the past tense—own brother to the Irishman in their love of a riot, any sort of a riot, for any reason or none; and Wesley got more than a taste of mob violence. Yet in the end he could say: "Here God has made all our enemies to be at peace with us, so that I might have preached in any part of the town. But I rather chose a meadow, that such as would might sit down, either on the grass or on the hedges—so the Cornish term their broad stone walls. Well-nigh all the town attended and with all possible seriousness. Surely forty years' labour has not been in vain."
So at last the little man was made welcome and could feel that he had roused the fishing-town from its long religious lethargy. I wonder whether in his strenuous life, and he came twenty-seven times to St. Ives, he ever found time to wander into the old church, study the wonderful carving of its bench-ends, and take pleasure in its ancient communion plate "and its pair of collecting basins with handles," or whether he was only occupied with things of the spirit?
Irving
Inland from St. Ives lies the ugly mining village of Halsetown, where Sir Henry Irving spent the years of his childhood. His mother was a Cornish woman of the Behenna family, and to Halsetown she brought him to stay with an aunt. The uncle was captain of a local mine—"captain" meaning any sort of an overseer from the manager to a man with only a boy under him! Here the lad ran wild with his cousins. "At any rate," said he in after years, "Halsetown gave me a good physical start in life. I attribute much of my endurance of fatigue—which is a necessary part of an actor's life—to the free and open and healthy years I spent there." Nor are these many hours of sunshine and the salubrious air only good for youth; life lengthens here unnoticeably until it has reached three figures, and even then shows a strength that is amazing. Mrs. Zenobia Stevens, who was buried at Zennor in 1763, aged 102, was tenant for ninety-nine years of the Duke of Bolton. On the expiration of her lease, being then in her hundredth year, she went on this matter of business to the Duke's Court at St. Ives; and it is said that she excused herself from accepting a second glass of wine on the plea that it was growing late and she had not only some way to go, but had to ride home on a young unbroken horse.