[Chapter III]
Dolly Pentreath, the fishwife of Mousehole, had a reputation as wide, but different, as Sir Humphry's. Her portrait is sold in Penzance, wherein Dolly is only a name now. She belonged to the adjoining parish of Paul, and so there is no statue to her in the Market-place, where she sold fish, and talked the old Cornish with the real twenty-two carat stamp upon it. The Bookworm said Dolly's fame had done a good deal towards advertising the land of a lost language. He showed us the portrait of a determined-looking, passionate old party in short skirts, and a creel on her back. We had seen already several ancient dames carrying fish quite as capable of taking care of themselves, which indicated that if the language is lost, the race survives. It's a nice walk along the shore to Mousehole. We might have lingered at Newlyn, only the Bookworm wanted to get upon classic ground, where old Dolly used to smoke her pipe, and drink her flagon of beer with the best, and talk Cornish—the real old lingo, hot, sweet, and strong, so that those who heard her once never forgot it. Dolly lived to one hundred and two, and then departed, carrying with her, in her queer old brain, the completest vocabulary of the Cornish language upon earth. This is the legend, to which is to be added that she had the reputation of being a "witch." There exists an ancient corner in the village where Dolly would be at home again if she could come back; and the Bookworm walked up and down, and in and out, touching the stones and rubbing shoulders against the pillars, as though he expected to feel an electric shock, or receive the straight tip from the old lady that he'd touched the spot, like Homocea. He may have passed over it, but he was happy. If he could only have found an old clay pipe that Dolly had smoked!
An old man sitting on a post watched us out of a corner of his eye. He knew what we were up to, and that there was a trifle at the end of it. Guy tackled him.
"Dolly Pentreath? Oh yes; she died poor, and was buried in the parish churchyard of Paul. People came in shoals to see her monument and read the inscription."
"Had anybody got anything belonging to her?"
Not that he knew by. "She might have had a Bible or a hymn-book, but she wasn't given that way much. So many people wanted 'relics,' and if there ever were any, they would have been sold long ago."
All this was straight enough, and his blue eye looked as clear as the well of truth. We stood around him as an oracle, and he began his story.
"Dolly Pentreath was a fine woman, with a voice that you could hear to Newlyn. She had the heart of a lion, and it was told of her that when a press-gang landed in search of men for the navy, Dolly took up a hatchet and fought them back to their boats, and so cursed them in old Cornish that that crew never ventured to come again.[B] And she was artful as well as brave, and saved a man, 'wanted' by the law for the purpose of hanging, by hiding him in her chimney. Dolly lived in an old house overlooking the quay, the walls of which were thick, and in the chimney was a cavity in which a man could stand upright, and it was a convenient hiding-place for many things. 'Back along' Mousehole was one family, and the ties of blood spoke eloquently; so, when a man rushed into Dolly's cottage, saying the officers were after him, and would hang him to the yardarm of the ship out in the bay, from which he had taken French leave the week before, he did not appeal in vain.