A CRABBER'S HOLE, GERRAN'S BAY.
"Delighted to see you, ladies; delighted to see any friends of the Professor's; and I hope you enjoyed the Cove, and that you're all hungry, and will find your tea to your liking. It's the best we can do; we're very homely folk here, but we try to make people comfortable," and so on and so on, a regular stream of chatty conversation, given in the strongest Cornish, with the kindliest of Cornish hearts, as she ushered us into a neat little parlour at the back of the inn.
There lay spread, not one of your dainty afternoon teas, with two or three wafery slices of bread and butter, but a regular substantial meal. Cheerful candles—of course in serpentine candlesticks—were already lit, and showed us the bright teapot full of that welcome drink to weary travellers, hot, strong and harmless; the gigantic home-baked loaf, which it seemed sacrilegious to have turned into toast; the rich, yellow butter—I am sure those lovely cows had something to do with it, and also with the cream, so thick that the spoon could almost have stood upright in it. Besides, there was a quantity of that delicious clotted cream, which here accompanies every meal and of which I had vainly tried to get the receipt, but was answered with polite scorn, "Oh, ma'am, it would be of no use to you: Cornish cream can only be made from Cornish cows!"
Whether this remarkable fact in natural history be true or not, let me record the perfection of Mary Mundy's cream, which, together with her jam and her marmalade, was a refection worthy of the gods.
She pressed us again and again to "have some more," and her charge for our magnificent meal was as small as her gratitude was great for the slight addition we made to it.
"No, I'll not say no, ma'am, it'll come in handy; us has got a young niece to bring up—my brother and me—please'm. Yes, I'm glad you came, and I hope you'll come again, please'm. And if you see the Professor, you'll tell him he's not forgotten, please'm."
This garniture of "please'm" at the end of every sentence reminded us of the Venetian "probbedirla," per ubbedirla, with which our gondolier Giovanna used to amuse us, often dragging it in in the oddest way. "Yes, the Signora will get a beautiful day, probbedirla," or "My wife has just lost her baby, probbedirla." Mary Mundy's "please'm" often came in with equal incongruity, and her voluble tongue ran on nineteen to the dozen; but her talk was so shrewd and her looks so pleasant—once, no doubt, actually pretty, and still comely enough for a middle-aged woman—that we departed, fully agreeing with her admiring Professor that