The High Street was still noisily busy, and with the coming of night was brilliant with many lights. The rain, too, sputtered only fitfully, and so the open air stall-keepers hung out their wares again. This was not like Cornwall, to our thinking; it more nearly resembled the Edgware Road on a Saturday night, save that dissipation was not evident. The folk were orderly, as might be expected of the Cornish people, even on Saturday evening.
The Cornishman is imaginative, and deeply, emotionally, but unaffectedly religious. He is a Celt, and consequently he generally wears an air of gentle melancholy. Hospitality and warm-heartedness are also among his characteristics, as all who have journeyed much in Cornwall have occasion to know.
But although the Cornishman is so religiously disposed, Cornwall is by no means a stronghold of the Established Church; the Cornishman’s piety runs in the channel of Dissent, and in many lonely valleys, and frequently on wild moorlands, far from sight of other houses, you come upon his conventicles, built after the fashion of the houses that are represented in children’s first efforts at drawing, in what I may perhaps be allowed to term the “box-of-bricks” style of architecture.
These Bible Christian or Bryanite chapels, with their Wesleyan rivals, are numerous above those of all other sects, and are nearly all inexpressibly dreary in appearance. In the larger towns they are often of immense bulk, as witness the chapels of the various Wesleyan sects at Redruth, of a size larger beyond comparison with the parish church.
Not only is the Establishment weak in its hold on the people; it labours under the additional disadvantage of scanty revenues; rich livings are the exception rather than the rule in Cornwall. If you take up the “Clergy List,” and scan the values of Cornish livings, you will find them, in a very large proportion of cases, extremely meagre; the clerk in holy orders frequently not receiving so large a sum as the small stipend accorded his secular namesake of London city—poor clerk!
We did not remain at Redruth the following day (Sunday), but left the town shortly after breakfast, on our way westward. Carn Brea Hill loomed ahead beyond the works of the tin-streamers, and we made direct for it.
LXIV.
Carn Brea is a hill of commanding personality, steep and rugged, and encumbered with huge granite boulders, that give its highest point a peculiarly fantastic corona. Here, where rocks are largest and more wildly strewn, long-forgotten builders have contrived a gaunt tower, perched airily on devil-poised crags, overlooking the scarred and streaked mining-field that here stretches from sea to sea. It is with disgust that, as you make a painful and involved ascent of the hillside, and draw nearer this old fortress, you observe its walls repaired with stucco, and its windows filled with ginger-beer bottles and bottles of sweets.
