They seem to have been a turbulent race of people at Fowey, for they once actually became dissatisfied with their patron saint, the Irish St. Finbar, and when they rebuilt their church in 1336 they dismissed him and adopted St. Nicholas to guide their future destinies. Perhaps it was because St. Nicholas was the patron saint of all sailors, as he allayed a great storm when on a voyage to the Holy Land. What is now named Drake's Island, off Plymouth, was formerly named St. Nicholas. It would not be difficult to find many other churches dedicated to St. Nicholas on the sea-coast from there to the north, and we remembered he was the patron saint at Aberdeen.
St. Nicholas is also the patron saint of the Russians, some of the Czars of that mighty Empire having been named after him. While St. Catherine is the patron saint of the girls, St. Nicholas is the patron saint of the boys, and strange to relate is also the patron saint of parish clerks, who were formerly called "scholars."
When pictured in Christian art this saint is dressed in the robe of a bishop, with three purses, or three golden balls, or three children. The three purses represent those given by him to three sisters to enable them to marry; but we did not know the meaning of the three golden balls, unless it was that they represented the money the purses contained. My brother suggested they might have some connection with the three golden balls hanging outside the pawnbrokers' shops. Afterwards we found St. Nicholas was the patron saint of that body. But the three children were all boys, who once lived in the East, and being sent to a school at Athens, were told to call on St. Nicholas on their way for his benediction. They stopped for the night at a place called Myra, where the innkeeper murdered them for their money and baggage, and placed their mangled bodies in a pickling-tub, intending to sell them as pork. St. Nicholas, however, saw the tragedy in a vision, and went to the inn, where the man confessed the crime, whilst St. Nicholas, by a miracle, raised the murdered boys to life again!
Sometimes he had been nicknamed "Nick," or "Old Nick," and then he became a demon, or the Devil, or the "Evil spirit of the North." In Scandinavia he was always associated with water either in sea or lake, river or waterfall, his picture being changed to that of a horrid-looking creature, half-child and half-horse, the horse's feet being shown the wrong way about. Sometimes, again, he was shown as an old black man like an imp, sitting on a rock and wringing the dripping water from his long black hair!
On our way towards St. Austell we passed some very interesting places to the right and left of our road, and had some fine views of the sea. Presently we arrived at a considerable village inhabited by miners, the name of which we did not know until my brother, who was walking with a miner in the rear, suddenly called to me, and pointing to a name on a board, said: "See where we've got to!" When my brother called out the name of the place, I heard a man shout from across the road in a triumphant tone of voice, "Yes, you're in it now, sir!" and sure enough we had arrived at St. Blazey, a rather queer name, we thought, for a place called after a saint! But, unlike the people of Fowey, the inhabitants seemed quite satisfied with their saint, and indeed rather proud of him than otherwise. Asked where we could get some coffee and something to eat, the quarryman to whom my brother had been talking directed us to a temperance house near at hand, where we were well served. We were rather surprised at the number of people who came in after us at intervals, but it appeared afterwards that my brother had incidentally told the man with whom he was walking about our long journey, and that we had walked about 1,300 miles. The news had circulated rapidly about the village, and we eventually found ourselves the centre of a crowd anxious to see us, and ask questions. They seemed quite a homely, steady class of men, and gave us a Cornish welcome and a Cornish cheer as we left the village.
SARCOPHAGUS OF THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON IN THE CRYPT OF ST. PAUL'S CATHEDRAL.
Just before reaching St. Blazey, however, we walked a short distance up a very charming little valley, which has been described as a paradise of ferns, wooden glades, and granite boulders, and possesses some of the finest landscapes in the district, with the ground in springtime azure with wild hyacinths. Some of the finest ferns grew in profusion in this glen, including the "Osmunda regalis" and the graceful lady fern; but, fortunately for the ferns, much of the valley passed through private grounds, and the pretty Carmears waterfall could only be seen on certain days.
The parish church of Luxulyan, after which village the valley was named, stood at the head of the glen, and as the people of Cornwall had so many saints, they had been able to spare two of them for Luxulyan, so that the church was dedicated conjointly to St. Cyricus and St. Julitta, while the name of a third was said to be concealed in the modern name of the village, St. Suhan, a saint who also appeared in Wales and Brittany. The name of the village well was St. Cyricus, which probably accounted for the name appearing the first in the dedication of the church. The church tower at one time contained the Cornish Stannary Records, but in the time of the Civil War they had been removed for greater safety to Lostwithiel, where they were unfortunately destroyed. There were many ancient and disused tin workings in the parish of Luxulyan, but a particularly fine kind of granite was quarried there, for use in buildings where durability was necessary—the lighthouse and beacon on Plymouth Breakwater having both been built with granite obtained from these quarries. There was also a very hard variety of granite much used by sculptors called porphyry, a very hard and variegated rock of a mixed purple-and-white colour. When the Duke of Wellington died, the Continent was searched for the most durable stone for his sepulchre, sufficiently grand and durable to cover his remains, but none could be found to excel that at Luxulyan. A huge boulder of porphyry, nearly all of it above ground, lying in a field where it had lain from time immemorial, was selected. It was estimated to weigh over seventy tons, and was wrought and polished near the spot where it was found. When complete it was conveyed thence to St. Paul's Cathedral, and now forms the sarcophagus of the famous Iron Duke. The total cost was about £1,100.
We had now to walk all the way to Land's End through a tin-mining country, which really extended farther than that, as some of the mines were under the sea. But the industry was showing signs of decay, for Cornwall had no coal and very little peat, and the native-grown timber had been practically exhausted. She had therefore to depend on the coal from South Wales to smelt the ore, and it was becoming a question whether it was cheaper to take the ore to the coal or the coal to the ore, the cost being about equal in either case. Meantime many miners had left the country, and others were thinking of following them to Africa and America, while many of the more expensive mines to work had been closed down. The origin of tin mining in Cornwall was of remote antiquity, and the earliest method of raising the metal was that practiced in the time of Diodorus by streaming—a method more like modern gold-digging, since the ore in the bed of the streams, having been already washed there for centuries, was much purer than that found in the lodes. Diodorus Siculus, about the beginning of the Christian Era, mentioned the inhabitants of Belerium as miners and smelters of tin, and wrote: "After beating it up into knucklebone shapes, they carry it to a certain island lying off Britain named Ictis (probably the Isle of Wight), and thence the merchants buy it from the inhabitants and carry it over to Gaul, and lastly, travelling by land through Gaul about thirty days, they bring down the loads on horses to the mouth of the Rhine."