For all the use it was, the sign-post need not have existed. After we had taken what looked the most likely road, and after another mile had been tramped, we came to another and more promising affair, which, we found, directed us, in the way we were going, to Grampound, a place we had not the remotest idea of visiting. There was nothing for it but to turn about and retrace our steps. This we did, and presently met some country folk. We could have embraced them, so long was it since we had seen any fellow-creatures, but we refrained, and merely asked the road and the distance to Veryan. Four and a half miles farther, it seemed.
With what haste and with how many more wrong turnings we pursued our way I will not speak.
We reached that village eventually, and only just before closing time. The windows of the one inn that Veryan possesses streamed brightly into the road as we fearfully crossed the threshold, and doubtfully begged (that is the word) a lodging for the night, and a meal to go to bed upon. I cannot call to mind the sign of that inn, but I have not forgotten the name of Mrs. Mason, our hostess. That were inexcusable, for surely no one could have been kinder to wearied wayfarers than she. We had tea (a high tea, to be sure) at that hour of night, and tea that night seemed ambrosia fit for gods. What a delightful tea that was! Cornish cream, new bread, apricot jam, and a mysteriously delicious preserve, whose name we never knew, but whose savour remains a fond and fast memory. And while tea progressed, we had music from the bar-parlour on the other side of the passage. Some one played upon a violin, and the airs he played were old sea-songs, that were new when Dibdin wrote, and popular when British sailors wore pig-tails, and fought the Frenchman and the Spaniard from youth to age; times when every man had his fill of fighting, and the stomach for it, too. So it befell that, even with that crazy fiddle and that unfinished performer, the songs he played were melodies that went straight to the heart, even as they originally came from that seat of a throbbing patriotism; tunes that made the pulses dance, the eyes to sparkle, and the cheek to flush. We have no need for such songs now, for we meet no foreign foe to-day. No storms rend the branches of the oak: the tree, alas! is rotting at the heart. Ah! the pity, the misery of it.
LXI.
Judge of our surprise when we found this morning that Veryan was not upon the sea, but over a mile removed from it. We had carelessly noted Veryan Bay marked on the map, and thus concluded that of course the village of the same name was seated beside the sea. We left our inn and Veryan with our pockets filled with the apples our kindly hostess pressed upon us at parting. My hostess, I salute you!
All through this day we wandered blunderingly, as if we had been chartless. Certainly, when the maps deal with such little-travelled districts as this, they become utterly untrustworthy for by-roads, and are only to be followed with suspicion for the highways. We set out for Truro, and at the outset were seduced from the narrow path by the tempting clusters of blackberries that hung upon the hedges of a hillside field. This led us at length upon the hamlet of Treworlas, a few scattered houses set down upon the edges of a golden moor, free to every breeze that blows, where the winds beat upon the walls of the cottages and shook them, and fluttered the feathers of the scurrying geese that patched the gold of the gorse and the green of the grass with moving patches of white. There was a house to let here, an empty house, with garden all overgrown with weeds, and a bill swinging in the window by one corner; not at all an undesirable little place—for a hermit. We inquired the rent of it—£5 per annum. Just the place for retirement from one’s kind: the ideal retreat for one crossed in love or soured by failure, or for the naturally misanthropical; we bear it in mind, for, though we are none of these, yet a time may come! From here we went on to Philleigh, a village that stands on a tongue of land pushing out into the salt-water Fal, where Ruan Creek sends spreading watery fingers between the hills. Steep, rain-washed roads, unkempt and deep rutted, lead down to the water, and a homely inn, with flaunting linen hanging out to dry, and gobbling ducks scavenging among the cart-tracks, wears a name remarkably poetic—The Roseland Inn. A forest of thick-growing, stunted oaks leads to the steam ferry at Trelissick, where the Fal winds between lovely woods that grow down to the water’s edge, and dip their branches in the stream. We crossed here mistakenly, thinking it to be King Harry Passage, and thus missing a sight of Tregothnan, Lord Falmouth’s country seat, famed in all the country round about for the charm of its situation.
ROSELAND INN, PHILLEIGH.
As the afternoon wore on to tea-time, we came into Truro, along a broad and surprisingly well-kept highway. But never a sight was there of the city until we had reached the hillside, where its outskirts of villas straggle into the country, detached and semi-detached, with lawns and flower-beds and gravel-paths, ah! so neat and clean-swept, all of them bearing the most high-falutin’ names. Truro is folded away from distant sight, in between the hills, where the Fal ceases its navigable course.