Although it is in shape and size (5 feet 6 inches high), just a typical Cornish cross, it is one of the most interesting: the front of it curiously incised with little holes, while the back, hitherto hidden, bears an inscription, which has been read as "Hic procumbunt corpora Piorum."
PENZANCE MARKET HOUSE.
Beyond this hub of Penzance is the more residential part, Alverton; and Alverton itself is of two quite distinct periods. Firstly, the delightfully quaint and cosy-looking Regency bay-fronted and plaster-faced villas by the Morrab Gardens, and then the modern stone-built residential suburb about Morrab Road.
The sea-front is quite casual. It boasts a hotel or two and some more early Regency cottages, and the broad asphalted parade, raised by a few feet above the narrow beach, commands widespread views over the shallow waters of Mount's Bay; but it is not thrust forward by Penzance as a great feature. It just happened, so to speak.
Almost coterminous with Penzance is Newlyn, on the west. The name of Newlyn does not indicate "new lake," or indeed, anything new, but derives, like that of Newlyn near Newquay, from St. Newlyna, or Neulwyn, a Breton maiden, who was murdered by a suitor whose love she did not requite. Pontivy Noyala, in Brittany, owes the second half of its name to her.
Newlyn is, of course, a busy fisher-village, and has now got a harbour of its own. They are wilful people at Newlyn, or were, as the following story will show.
Tithe of fish, as of other things, was claimed of old by, and paid to, the clergy, but that is now a thing of the past. The sturdy fisher-folk of Newlyn were among the earliest to resist it. They banded themselves together, painted "No Tithe" on a board which they nailed to a wall, to keep their determination hot, took especial care of their fish-offal, to the sorrow of the gulls, and waited. It was not long before the lawyer came to distrain for tithe. He got it, "in kind." The contents—extremely unsavoury—of various offal-tubs were poured over him.
About the year 1885 Newlyn began to be genuinely astonished. Now your true Cornishman—and they are all Cornishmen and true who live at Newlyn—is not easily astonished; that violent rippling of the mental surface is difficult to accomplish here. So the thing that thus surprised this fisher-town must have been, and was, remarkable. It was nothing less than the discovery of the artistic possibilities of the place. Every one who knew Newlyn knew well enough that it was picturesque: guide-books had told them so, and those who could not discover it for themselves, and knew only of the fishy smells that pervaded the seashore and the crooked alleys, would read to one another in those guide-books, "The village is picturesque," and then perceive that this was indeed the case. But although J. C. Hook had for many years painted Cornish seas, no one had yet painted the life of this place, or of St. Ives, or that of any other among the many characteristic villages of these coasts. Cornish landscapes and seascapes, yes; but the everyday existence of the folk who peopled them had not been revealed to art as a thing well worthy of treatment, alike for its drawing and colour, and for its mingled pathos, nobility, and the virtue of long endurance.