I do not think many people would spend much time in considering Paul as the site for a desirable residence. It stands in too lofty and exposed a situation for that: on an upland bracing enough in summer, but in winter a very playground of the winds. Few trees grow on those heights, and thus the tall tower of Paul church is not in the least hindered in its function of standing there as a landmark. From most points of view you perceive it, rising gauntly against the sky-line, in apparent solitude: the bulky tower of a church that must always have been larger than needful for its surroundings.
MONUMENT TO SIR WILLIAM GODOLPHIN, WITH ARMOUR.
No one ever thinks of adding "Saint" to the name of Paul, although the place derives its name from a saint: not the apostle Paul, to whom the church was long ago re-dedicated, but to St. Pol de Leon, a distinguished sixth-century Welsh missionary, who settled at that place in Brittany. The church contains a monument to Sir William Godolphin, dated 1681, and hung with his helmet, breastplate, sword, and rapier; but Paul is famed for a much more humble person: the well-known Dolly Pentreath, who, according to the monument erected here to her in 1860, by Prince Louis Lucien Bonaparte, was the last person who spoke the Cornish language. The interest of this scion of the Bonapartes in Dolly Pentreath was that of a student of languages. Other Bonapartes might dream of glory and Empire; he was a philologist, and took a great deal more interest in the memory of this old fish-wife, who died in 1778 and spoke a dying tongue, than in marshals and generals. According to surviving tales of the old woman, she was a very unamiable, cross-grained old person; and it has been left to later investigators to throw doubt upon this accidental fame. No one, of course, speaks Cornish now, but phrases and odd words of that extinct tongue are still current. I have heard—it was twenty years ago, at Mousehole—a mother calling her child indoors at dusk, "or else the bukkha-dhu will have you"; and "bukkha-dhu," which means "black spirit," is both Cornish and superstition.
A specimen of Cornish on the monument to Dolly Pentreath renders the ordinary person quite reconciled to its being an extinct language. Here it is: the twentieth chapter of Exodus, twelfth verse:
"Gwra perthi de taz ha de mam: mal de dythiow bethenz hyr war an tyr neb an Arleth de Dew ryes Dees."
That is to say:
"Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee."
No one knows how Mousehole, the fisher-village beyond Newlyn, got its name. It lies, it is true, in a hole, but so also do most of these villages; and there is also a cavern along the shore, beyond the little harbour, but it is not supposed that it originated the name. Mousehole is a smelly place, but its smells are neither so many nor so penetrating as they used to be. It is remarkable for the sturdy old granite manor-house of the Keigwin family in its very midst, with very boldly projecting porch. For many years past it has been the "Keigwin Arms" inn. Some history attaches to it, for it was here, in front of his own house, that Jenkin Keigwin was killed in 1595, struck down by a cannon-ball fired by the Spaniards in their raid of that year upon Penzance, Newlyn, and Mousehole.