The people simply don't understand analogy or imagery; their minds are very literal. In this part of the world they may well be literal, for the hard necessity of making a livelihood from very poor material must crush out fun. Yet in spite of many hardships endured, it is a rare thing to see a pale or miserable-looking child. The children are round and rosy, with sturdy legs, as indeed they may well have for they need them. This general well-being cannot be altogether attributed to the pure air, because in the Shetlands and on the West Coast of Scotland where the air is just as pure the children are usually brown and thin. It may be that this is due to the lack of milk, the heaths of Scotland affording scant pasturage, while the constant moisture of the air in Cornwall makes the grass grow richly.
At midday you will see the bairns running along the street munching great pasties—a Cornish specialty—made with bits of meat and onion and potato in a cover of paste, and the pasty seems to be the school-child's usual dinner. Another specialty of Cornwall are the yellow saffron cakes, so unappetizing in appearance to those unused to them. Of the cream there is hardly need to speak. As one ardent admirer of the Duchy remarked: "Of course, Devonshire cream is Cornish cream, only they've managed to get all the credit for it." In spite of this testimony it seems to me there is a difference, the Cornish variety is at once more fluid and more lumpy, but this may be an erroneous opinion based on insufficient experience.
Of history Cornwall has little. The brightest jewel in her coronet is that she stood unfailingly for the Stuarts in the Civil Wars, and many a church holds a letter of thanks from King Charles I. Except for the struggles of that epoch, the Duchy has little to tell of what may be called historical times, but before them much. It is in the misty ages before the Norman Conquest that history was made in Cornwall, and every now and then we catch fleeting glimpses of scenes standing out bright and clear amid a general fog, just as we can to-day catch the vivid pictures of the landscape before the grey mists sweep down with incredible speed and blot them out. We see Athelstan's terrible fight with the Britons; his establishment of the collegiate church at St. Buryan in pursuance of his vow, when he returned victorious from the Scilly Isles. We get brilliant peeps in the legends of King Arthur; in the mysterious beehive huts and stone circles of a people who have vanished; in the whimsical tales of the early saints who scattered themselves so freely over the land on their arrival from Ireland; and we find hieroglyphic messages we cannot read in structures we call cromlechs and in the cliff-castles.
Small wonder that Cornwall is a land of legend and story, and that tales of fabulous men and wonder-working men abound. In our very earliest nursery days, long before we could point to Cornwall on the map, we learned to repeat:
"Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum,
I smell the blood of a Cornishman.
Let him be alive or let him be dead,
I'll grind his bones to make me bread."
And if modern nurseries substitute "Englishman" for "Cornishman," that is distinctly their loss. The coast with its mighty fragments and giant "chairs" and enormous blocks of stone is quite obviously the home of giants.
II
THE GATEWAY OF THE DUCHY