Of the grief and agony of his father and of his family, I will not speak; it can easily be imagined what distress and shame they suffered.
Mr H., the father, was a wealthy man, of good position and family; but the young man, an only son, brought up to no profession, but only to inherit his father’s riches, had fallen, probably from sheer want of employment, into bad company, had played for very high stakes—lost—played again—exhausted his father’s patience in paying his debts, and at last had ‘taken to the road’ to replenish his purse—a not very uncommon proceeding in those days—while at the same time keeping his place in society.
From his unbusiness-like haste and want of looking after the whole of the booty, in the case of Mrs C. and her friend, it is to be presumed that he had only lately adopted the practice of—as it was politely called—‘collecting his rents on the road,’ even if it was not his first attempt. How long, however, he might have continued the ‘collection,’ but for the accident of the mask having been blown aside, is another question.
If this were fiction, I might enlarge on young H.’s future career in another land. I might, on the one hand, make him go from bad to worse, and end his career by murder and a murderer’s death. Or, on the other hand, I might depict him as leading a new life in a new country, and eventually returning to England, to the joy and comfort of his family, and worthily inheriting his father’s wealth and position. I might even describe his penitent introduction to Mrs C., and his deep gratitude to her for checking him in his downward career; and still further might end the romance by his falling in love with, and marrying Mrs C.’s daughter. But romance is denied to me, for the story is not fiction, but fact in all its details. Mrs C. was an ancestress of the writer’s, and the story has been handed down in the family.
Being, therefore, obliged to keep to facts, I am compelled to admit that I know nothing as to young H.’s after-life; so I must close my true history by supposing that he was never again heard of in his native country for good or evil, after his detection by Mrs C. as ‘a gentleman of the road.’
AN ANCIENT PEOPLE.
There is no lack of literature about Cornwall. Hardly any other county in England finds so many to write about it. It is a favourite with novelists as a place in which to give their imaginary characters ‘a local habitation and a name;’ and Tre, Pol, and Pen abound in their pages. Every year there is a crop of articles about it in the newspapers and magazines for the benefit of those who choose it for the scene of their autumn rambles, or who wish to renew their recollection of its rocky headlands, washed by the deep-blue Atlantic waves, its sheltered coves, its glorious sunsets, and its wealth of ferns and rare birds and flowers. In nine cases out of ten, it is of the Land’s End and its neighbourhood that people thus write; indeed, in the minds of many at a distance, the Land’s End is Cornwall, much as the Fens are popularly supposed to be Lincolnshire. But there is much that is interesting about the county and its people which only those who live in Cornwall are likely to observe. It is not as other counties, and the Cornish are not as other folk who live ‘up the country’—the local name for all beyond the Tamar. They have peculiarities of custom and of speech, not to be accounted for merely by the fact that they are far away from the great centres of national life, and are, as it were, living in the day before yesterday. They are of a distinct race, the kindred of the Welsh, the Irish, and the Bretons, but a race whose language has perished, save in the names of places and people; and the tongue they speak is not the English of to-day, but, with a mixture of Celtic idiom, the English of two centuries ago, the English of our translation of the Bible. Cornwall is emphatically an ancient county, and there is an unmistakably old-world flavour about everything that belongs to it.
One thing which particularly strikes any one who converses much with the labouring classes is, that they speak much more grammatically than their compeers usually do. There are the peculiar idioms which we have just mentioned; but apart from these, the language is rather that of educated people than what one usually hears in other counties. This arises from the fact that English was scarcely introduced into Cornwall until the Elizabethan age, and that when it was introduced it was by the upper classes. The rest, who used Cornish for their intercourse with each other, learned English as a foreign tongue, and learned the refined form of it. That form it still retains; and hence, quaint and odd as it is when used in the Cornish way, from the lips of these western folk it is never vulgar. We are not well enough read in the mysteries of the ancient tongue to know the reason for the singular use of the personal pronouns, but certain it is that they seem to have a rooted antipathy to the objective case. ‘Tell it to she,’ ‘Bring he to I,’ and ‘This is for we,’ are the universal forms. Then the preposition ‘to’ is always used instead of ‘at,’ as, ‘I live to Bodmin.’ In Cornwall, too, people are never surprised, but ‘frightened’ or ‘hurried;’ never in a bad temper, but in a ‘poor’ one; and the very eggs and milk, if kept too long, go ‘poor.’ When they live beyond their means, they ‘go scat;’ and if they are not too particular as to honourable dealing, they ‘furneague.’
But in spite of these peculiarities, one hears the ring of good old English speech, such as nowadays we may look for vainly elsewhere, save in the pages of the Bible. Girls are spoken of as the maids or the maidens, and when they leave the house, they ‘go forth.’ ‘Come forth, my son,’ is an invitation one often hears, occasionally even when ‘my son’ turns out to be a horse or a dog. And if we wish to know the name of any little boy whom we may meet, the best chance of getting an intelligible answer is to put the question in the form of, ‘How are you called, my son?’
In things that meet the eye, too, we seem to have come into an older world in Cornwall. There are the old-fashioned earthen or ‘clomb’ pitchers, of exactly the pattern we see in the pictures of old Bibles in the hands of Rebekah or Zipporah; though we cannot say we ever saw one balanced upon the top of a woman’s head. Till very lately, oxen were still used to draw the plough; and to this day, in the country districts, kitchen stoves, and indeed coal-fires of any sort, are hardly known. The fuel is commonly dried furze, which is burned either in an earthen oven or on a wide open hearth. It is thrown on piece by piece with a pitchfork, till the iron plate on which the baking is to be done is considered hot enough; then the plate is swept clean, and the cakes—biscuits, as they are termed—or pasties having been ranged in order upon it, an iron vessel shaped somewhat like a flower-pot is turned over them, the furze is again piled on, and a large heap of glowing embers raked over all. No further attention is paid to the cooking; but when the embers are cold, the things are done. And those pasties, what wonderful productions they are to the uninitiated; there appears to be scarcely any article of food that does not find its way into them. Parsley pasties, turnip pasties (very good these are, too), ‘licky,’ that is, leek pasties, pasties of conger-eel, of potatoes and bacon, of all kinds of meat and of all kinds of fruit, the variety is endless.