After a pause Killigrew replied, “I humbly thank your Majesty for the information you have given me, for, although I have often heard that our Saviour was crucified between two thieves, yet I never knew who they were till now.”
The reply of the King to this witty, though caustic and uncourtierlike, speech is unhappily not recorded. The sarcasm was rendered more mordant from the fact that both the King and the Pope were, at the time, engaged in persecuting and robbing the former’s Protestant subjects.
Another story of a much more tragic nature is connected with Falmouth, and relates to an old couple who lived towards the latter end of the sixteenth century, a few miles out of the town on the way to Penryn. They had two children—a son and a daughter; and the former—partly owing, so the story goes, to his parents falling upon evil times—ran away to sea, and of him they heard nothing for many years.
One winter’s night, however, when a great gale was blowing in the Channel, and sweeping across the land from the Atlantic, a stranger came to their door and asked for food and shelter. The old couple allowed him to come in, and gave him food; and whilst he was refreshing himself and warming his chilled bones by their fireside he entertained them with wonderful stories of his adventures amongst pirates and in foreign lands, for he was a sailor man. At last he fetched out of his pocket a piece of gold with which to pay them, and asked them to give him a bed. The old woman, surprised at such wealth, after a time persuaded her husband to permit the strange traveller to remain the night, and showed the sailor upstairs to a room. She remained chatting with him for some time, and during their talk he showed so much money, jewels, trinkets, etc., that she was perfectly dazzled at the sight. The old woman, whose greed had been awakened, left him to his slumbers, and the tired wanderer lay down to rest, well content thus to have obtained shelter from the storm.
Next morning the daughter—who now lived at Penryn,—appeared on the scene, and after the usual greetings she said, “Did not a sailor man come to see you last night?”
“What do you mean, my child?” asked her mother, adding hastily, “A sailor man! What could have put such a thought into your head?”
“Because,” answered the girl, “one asked his way here last night, and said he wanted to see you.”
“No, no,” continued the old woman. “No sailor came here.”
But all the while the girl’s father was fidgeting and looking as though the subject and the questioning was unpleasing to him.
“Father, do you, too, say no one came?” inquired the daughter, anxiously. “Because it was our Dickon who came to see me, and told me he had come back from foreign lands, where he had found a gold mine, and had got as rich as the Grand Mogul himself.”