VIEW ON THE CORNISH COAST.
“On the granite cliffs at the Land’s End I met with an old man, seventy-two years of age, of whom I asked some questions relative to the extraordinary rocks scattered about this part of the coast. He immediately opened his whole budget of local anecdotes, telling them in a high quavering treble voice, which was barely audible above the dash of the breakers beneath, and the fierce whistling of the wind among the rocks around us. However, the old fellow went on talking incessantly, hobbling along before me, up and down steep paths, and along the very brink of a fearful precipice, with as much coolness as if his sight was as clear and his step as firm as in his youth. When he had shown me all that he could show, and had thoroughly exhausted himself with talking, I gave him a shilling at parting. He appeared to be perfectly astonished by a remuneration which the reader will doubtless consider the reverse of excessive, thanked me at the top of his voice, and then led me in a great hurry, and with many mysterious nods and gestures, to a hollow in the grass, where he had spread on a clean [pg 218]handkerchief a little stock-in-trade of his own, consisting of barnacles, bits of rock and ore, and specimens of dried sea-weed. Pointing to these, he told me to take anything I liked as a present in return for what I had given him. He would not hear of my buying anything; he was not, he said, a regular guide, and I had paid him more already than such an old man was worth. What I took out of his handkerchief I must take as a present only. I saw by his manner that he would be really mortified if I contested the matter with him, so as a present I received one of his pieces of rock. I had no right to deprive him of the pleasure of doing a kind action because there happened to be a few more shillings in my pocket than in his.”
CHAPTER XX.
Sketches of our Coasts.—Cornwall (continued).
Wilkie Collins’s Experiences as a Pedestrian—Taken for “Mapper,” “Trodger,” and Hawker—An Exciting Wreck at Penzance—The Life-line sent out—An Obstinate Captain—A Brave Coastguardsman—Five Courageous Young Ladies—Falmouth and Sir Walter Raleigh—Its Rapid Growth—One of its Institutions—A Dollar Mine—Religious Fishermen—The Lizard and its Associations for Voyagers—Origin of the Name—Mount St. Michael, the Picturesque—Her Majesty’s Visit—An Heroic Rescue at Plymouth—Another Gallant Rescue.
Mr. Collins’s experiences as a pedestrian are amusing. Says he:—“We enter a small public-house by the road-side to get a draught of beer. In the kitchen we behold the landlord and a tall man, who is a customer. Both stare as a matter of course; the tall man especially, after taking one look at our knapsacks, fixes his eyes firmly on us, and sits bolt upright on the bench without saying a word—he is evidently prepared for the worst we can do. We get into conversation with the landlord, a jovial, talkative fellow, who desires greatly to know what we are, if we have no objection. We ask him what he thinks we are? ‘Well,’ says the landlord, pointing to my friend’s knapsack, which has a square ruler strapped to it for architectural drawing, ‘Well, I think you are both of you Mappers; mappers, who come here to make new roads; you may be coming to make a railroad, I dare say. We’ve had mappers in the county before this. I know a mapper myself. Here’s both your good healths.’ We drink the landlord’s good health in return, and disclaim the honour of being ‘mappers;’ we walk through the country, we tell him, for pleasure alone, and take any roads we can get, without wanting to make new ones. The landlord would like to know, if that is the case, why we carry these loads at our backs? Because we want to carry our luggage about with us. Couldn’t we pay to ride? Yes, we could. And yet we like walking better? Yes, we do. This last answer utterly confounds the tall customer, who has been hitherto listening intently to the dialogue. It is evidently too much for his credulity; he pays his reckoning, and walks out in a hurry without uttering a word. The landlord appears to be convinced, but it is only in appearance; he looks at us suspiciously in spite of himself. We leave him standing at his door, keeping his eye on us as long as we are in sight, still evidently persuaded that we are ‘mappers,’ but ‘mappers’ of a bad order, whose perseverance is fraught with some unknown peril to the security of the Queen’s highway.
“We get on into another district. Here public opinion is not flattering. Some of the groups gathered together in the road to observe us begin to speculate on our characters before we are quite out of hearing. Then this sort of dialogue, spoken in serious, subdued tones, just reaches us. Question—‘What can they be?’ Answer—‘Trodgers!’
“This is particularly humiliating, because it happens to be true. We certainly do trudge, and are therefore properly, though rather unceremoniously, called trudgers, or ‘trodgers.’ But we sink to a lower depth yet a little further on. We are viewed as objects of pity. It is a fine evening. We stop and lean against a bank by the road-side to look at the sunset. An old woman comes tottering by on high pattens, very comfortably and nicely clad. She sees our knapsacks, and instantly stops in front of us, and begins to moan lamentably. Not understanding at first what this means, we ask respectfully if she feels at all ill? ‘Ah! poor fellows, poor fellows!’ she sighs in answer, ‘obliged to carry all your baggage on your own backs! very hard! poor lads! very hard indeed!’ and the good old soul goes away groaning over our evil plight, and mumbling something which sounds very like an assurance that she has no money to give us.