Peeps at Many Lands: England

by John Finnemore

"You see, master dear," said his disciple, "I do not put anything into the pot save this stick, with which I stir them."

In a rough and cruel age the saints taught people to be kind to children and to poor dumb beasts and birds. Here is a story of a saint and a child.

There was a saint whose name was St. Maccarthen, and the ruler of his countryside was King Eochaid. One day the king sent his little son with a message to the saint. The little boy's mother gave him a red, round apple to eat on the way. The boy played with his pretty apple as he went, tossing it up and catching it. As it happened, it rolled from him and was lost. The child hunted here and there until he was tired out, and as the sun was setting he laid himself down in the middle of the way and went to sleep. As he slept, St. Maccarthen came along the road. The saint at once wrapped his mantle round the sleeping child, and sat beside him all night to guard his slumber. Many people passed along the way, but the saint turned them aside, for he would neither break the child's slumber nor permit an accident to befall him.

Many a saint had not only a church named after him, but a well also. Cornwall is full of "holy wells." In former days these wells were held to possess miraculous powers, and people came from great distances to drink the sacred water and make vows to the saint in whose honour the well was named. One of the best-known of these wells is the Well of St. Keyne. It was believed that, in the case of a newly-married couple, the first to drink of the water of this well would hold the mastery of the household. Southey has a ballad on this subject, describing how a bridegroom hurried from the church to the well. But all in vain: his wife had taken a bottle of the water to church with her!

Cornwall is a land of bleak, rugged granite heights and desolate moors, with lovely dells nestling amid the wilderness, combes filled with trees, and fields whose grass is green the winter through. Its coast is for the most part very dangerous, with immense cliffs, broken but by few openings. It is a coast to which the sailor gives a wide berth, especially in stormy weather, and if he fails to do so, he will almost certainly pay the penalty with his life. Many terrible shipwrecks have taken place off the shores of Cornwall, especially upon the deadly Manacles, the great reef near the Lizard, and the churchyards in the neighbourhood are full of the graves of many and many a drowned man or woman tossed up on the beach near at hand.

If you should go for a stroll on the cliffs about the Lizard some fine morning in July, you would see fishermen there, smoking and staring out to sea in, as it would seem to you, an idle fashion. But, suddenly, one of them, who has been sitting on the turf, springs to his feet. He begins to leap and yell as if he had gone mad. He points out to sea, and begins to roar over the edge of the cliff to his friends below. His companions on the watch now show an equal excitement, and you wonder what it is all about. You look long at the place to which they are pointing, and at length you make out that there is a darkish patch of water over which a number of sea-birds are hovering. It is a vast shoal of pilchards coming in-shore, and the apparent idlers on the cliff were watching for it.

The men on the cliff are called "huers"—shouters (from the French huer, to shout)—and their cries and signals direct their friends in the boats which way to pull to surround the shoal. From the surface the shoal cannot be seen, but the "huers" aloft can make out every movement of the vast mass offish, and guide the fishermen below.

A pilchard is a fish which looks much like a herring, but it is smaller, though it has larger scales. The shoals appear at the end of June, but at that time they are in deep water, and the fishing-smacks sail out in search of them and put down drift-nets. These nets are hung in the water like walls of hemp set across the drift of the tide. The pilchards swim into the nets, thrust their heads through the meshes, and are caught by the gills. This kind of fishing can only be carried on by night, for the pilchards are too keen-sighted to swim into the meshes by day.