In the old days, the Cornish were great smugglers. Indeed, the natural features of the coast are such, that they would have been almost more than human if they were not. Even when it did not pay very well, the love of adventure enlisted the whole population in its favour. The farmers who did not themselves help to run a cargo on a moonless night, would, when the riders—the coastguard—were out of the way, lend their horses to those who did, so that long before daylight the kegs were all carried off far inland, or stowed away in the hiding-holes which nearly every house possessed. A darker page of Cornish history is that of the days of wrecking. Terrible sights have some of those pitiless beaches witnessed, when the doomed vessel was lured on by false lights to be the prey of men more pitiless still. At St Eval, between Padstow and Newquay, a lame horse used to be led on stormy nights along the cliffs with a lantern fixed on its head; and many a craft, supposing it to be the light of a ship riding at anchor, was then steered by her luckless crew straight into the very jaws of death. Wrecks were looked upon as a legitimate harvest of the sea, even as things to be prayed for, like a shoal of pilchards or a lode of tin. The remains of that feeling are not extinct even yet. A few years ago, a vessel laden with Manchester goods was wrecked on the north coast. Her name was the Good Samaritan. Of course such of her cargo as was saved was supposed to be handed over to the coastguard, according to law; but a good deal of flotsam and jetsam was quietly appropriated notwithstanding, the fortunate finders never dreaming that there could be anything morally wrong in such acquisitions, though they might not be strictly legal. Some months afterwards, a lady of the neighbourhood was visiting the cottagers and asking them how they had got through the hard winter that was just over; and she was told by one of the simple folk that times had been bad indeed, that work had been slack and wages low, and that it had been a severe struggle to keep a home together. ‘And indeed I don’t know what we should have done, if the Lord hadn’t sent us the Good Samaritan!’
It is reported of a worthy old parson on the west coast at the end of the last century, when wrecks were considered as godsends, and it was an article of faith that the owners of a ship lost all title to their property the moment her keel touched ground, that in the long extempore prayer which, in defiance of the rubrics, was then generally indulged in before the sermon, he was accustomed, as the winter drew on, to introduce a reference to this grim ocean harvest, in some such style as this: ‘Lord, we do not pray for wrecks; but since there must be some, grant, we beseech Thee, that they may be on our beach.’ Perhaps this was the divine who was in the middle of his sermon when the news reached the church that a vessel had just struck and was going to pieces in the bay, and who instantly concluded with the benediction, and left his surplice in the pulpit, so that he and his congregation might start fair upon the shore. Yet eager as was the rivalry for what could be snatched from the sea, there was no pilfering from any man’s heap. To this day, you have but to put a stone upon anything you find upon the beach, in token that it has been ‘saved,’ and you may leave it in perfect safety, for no Cornishman will take it then. If, on your return, you find it gone, you may be sure that some less scrupulous ‘up-country people’ have been by that way.
As to the ferns, every botanist knows the green treasures of this western land. Indeed, we wish he did not know quite so well; for though men of science may be trusted to pursue their researches without wanton destruction of the beauties of nature, it is too often far otherwise with the tourist. It is not only ’Arry who is to blame in this matter; those from whom one might expect more consideration for the feelings and the rights of others are not seldom the greatest sinners of all. Only last summer, a young man actually stripped two large hamperfuls of the beautiful sea-fern (Asplenium marinum) from the roof of a cave, utterly ruining its beauty for several years to come. There were plenty of specimens to be had elsewhere upon the cliffs for the climbing; but he must needs get a ladder and take fifty times as many as he could possibly want, just where it most grieved the inhabitants of the neighbourhood to lose them. But we fear our righteous indignation at the iniquities of the tourist will run away with us—how he ruthlessly exterminates rare ferns; how he comes into churches where service is going on, and walks about and stares around him; how he strews scenes of natural loveliness with his sandwich papers and his broken bottles; how he thinks to add interest to the rocks and cliffs by inscribing his name and the date of his visit upon their face. It is his mission, we suppose, to ‘vulgarise creation.’ But Cornwall will take a great deal of spoiling yet, and so will its people and its language, menaced as this last is by the penny paper and the Board School. And those who like a peep into a world which, in spite of railways and telegraphs and newspapers and nineteenth-century ideas, is still an old world, and full of old and quaint and beautiful things, will find enough in Cornwall to occupy them, as a Cornishman would say, for a ‘brave little bit of time.’
THE NET OF MARRIAGE.
The Rev. Harry Jones, writing in the Sunday at Home, says: ‘Some people, especially if they marry young and on the impulse of some taking fancy, without a due consideration of the very grave nature of the state they are entering, discover afterwards that his or her mate does not come up to the expectations which had been formed. The light and laughing love of the marriage and the early periods of married life are succeeded by a sense of disappointment. Then comes domestic indifference, perhaps recrimination. Both man and wife are deceived, and undeceived. Unintentionally perhaps, but really. Both feel, as it were, entangled. They have married in haste, and repent too often, not at leisure, but with mutual bitterness and ill-concealed unconcern for one another. Each generally thinks the other most to blame. And I do not believe that I am overstepping the limits of appropriate language when I say that the idea of being caught in a net represents their secret convictions. Here is a disastrous state of affairs. In this country, such a net cannot be easily broken. The pair have married for worse, in a more serious sense than these words are intended to bear in the marriage vows. What is to be done? I should very imperfectly express my advice if I simply said, “Make the best of it.” For though this is a rude rendering of the advice needed, much might be said to show how this can be done after a Christian way.... It is a great Christian rule that, to be loved, we must show kindness and consideration, and not expect to receive what we do not grant ourselves. “Give,” says Christ, “and it shall be given unto you. Judge not, and you shall not be judged. Condemn not, and you shall not be condemned.” And if this applies anywhere, it applies most in the case of those who are in the close relationship of husband and wife. Clouds sometimes come over the married life because too much consideration is expected. Show it, I would say, rather than demand it, if it has seemed to come short. Do not think to mend matters by a half-grudging endurance, but ask God to give His sacred help to the keeping of the rule “bear and forbear.” So may a hasty marriage, the beauty of which has been spoilt by some misunderstandings, ripen into the true affection which should mark this holy estate, and the cloud of disappointment give place to a love which rests upon no passing fancy, but upon an honest Christian observance between man and wife of the vow betwixt them made. So may the miserable afterthought of having been entangled in a relationship be blotted out, and succeeded, as years go on, by a love cemented with the desire to do right before God, in whose presence, and with prayer for whose blessing, the relationship was begun.’
TRIFLES.
An August day
Now passed away
For ever;
A sunny smile,