By day I was out of doors, wet or fine, but in the evening—and it was when evenings were longest—I sat with the others and gazed into the cavernous fireplace and basked and shivered in the alternating bursts of heat and cold. As a rule, the round baking-pot was on its polished stone on the hearth, with smouldering turves built up round it and heaped on the flat lid. In some parts of Cornwall they have good peat, called "pudding turves," which makes a hot and comparatively lasting fire. In the Land's End district they have only the turf taken from the surface, which makes the poorest of all fires, but it has to serve. By and by the big home-made loaf would be done, and when taken out would fill the room with its wholesome smell—one is almost tempted to call it fragrance. But to make a blaze and get any warmth furze was burnt. On the floor at one side of the hearth there was always a huge pile of it; the trouble was that it burnt up too quickly and took one person's whole time to keep the fire going. This onerous task was usually performed by the farmer's wife, who, after an exceedingly busy day beginning at five o'clock in the morning, appeared to regard it as a kind of rest or recreation. Standing between the hearth and pile she would pick up the top branch, and if too big with all its load of dry spines she would divide it, using her naked hands, and fling a portion on to the hearth. In a few moments the dry stuff would ignite and burn with a tremendous hissing and crackling, the flames springing up to a height of seven or eight feet in the vast hollow chimney. For a minute or two the whole big room would be almost too hot and lit up as by a flash of lightning. Then the roaring flames would sink and vanish, leaving nothing but a bed of grey ashes, jewelled with innumerable crimson and yellow sparks, rapidly diminishing. Then I would begin to think that "sitting by the fire" in this land was a mockery, that I was not warmed and made happy like a serpent in the sun, but was overcome from time to time by gusts of intolerable heat and light, with intervals of gloom that was almost darkness and bitter cold between. I should not have cared to spend the entire bitterly-cold winter of 1906-7 with no better fuel, but for a time I liked it well enough; it was a pleasure to feel the stirring to life of old instincts, to recover the associations which fire has for one that has lived in rude lands; and then, too, the glorious effect of the blaze at its greatest was intensified by the cold and gloom that preceded and followed it.
As I wished to know how they lived I had the ordinary fare and found it quite good enough for any healthy person: pork fattened on milk and home-cured; milk (from the cow) and Cornish clotted cream, which is unrivalled; sometimes a pasty, in which a little chopped-up meat is mixed with sliced turnip and onion and baked in a crust, and finally the thin Cornish broth with sliced swedes which give it a sweetish taste. Then there was the very excellent home-made bread, and saffron cake, on which the Cornish child is weaned and which he goes on eating until the last day of his life. With every meal they drink tea. They are very good eaters: one day the farmer's wife told me that each one of her six little children consumed just double what I did. And the result of this abundance and of an open-air life in that wet and windy country is that the people are as healthy and strong and long-lived as any in the world.
The children are wonderful. You may go to village after village and look in vain for a sickly or unhappy face among them. It is true you do not find the very beautiful children one often sees in both England and Ireland, the angelic children with shining golden hair, eyes of violet or pure forget-me-not blue and exquisite flesh tints, nor do you find children with so much charm. They are, generally speaking, more commonplace; the wonder is in their uniform high state of well-being. One of the prettiest scenes I ever beheld was a procession on Empire Day, May 24, of all the school children in Penzance. They were all, even to the poorest, prettily dressed, and those of a good number of schools, Catholic, Methodist and Anglican, had very beautiful distinctive costumes. As I watched the mile-long procession going by in Market Jew Street, every face aglow with happy excitement, I began to search in the ranks for one that was thin and sad-looking or pale or anæmic, but failed to find such a one.
We have been told by an English traveller in Japan that children are best off in that land where a mother is never seen to slap or heard to scold her child, and where a child is never heard to cry. Now a Japanese visitor to England has informed us that it is not so, that mothers do sometimes slap or scold a child, and children do sometimes cry. I can say the same of West Cornwall, and nevertheless believe that compared with other parts of England it is a children's paradise. A common complaint made by English residents is that the children are not taught to know their place—that they do just what they like. "When my children want to go anywhere," a mother said to me, "they do not ask my permission: but they are very good—they always tell me where they are going. I do not forbid them because I know they would go just the same." The schoolmaster in a village I stayed at told me as an instance of the power the children have that one morning on passing a cottage he heard sounds of crying and voices in loud argument and went in to ascertain the cause. He found the man and his wife and their two little children—Billy the boy and Winnie the girl, aged nine—all in great distress. The man had received a letter from his cousin in Constantine to say that the village festival was about to take place and inviting him to go to him on a two or three days' visit and to take Billy. He wanted to go and so, of course, did Billy, and now Winnie had said that she must be taken too! In vain they had reasoned with her, pointing out that she could not go because she had not been included in the invitation; she simply said that if Billy went she would go, and from that position they could not move her. The result was that the visit to Constantine had to be abandoned; the good man sadly informed the schoolmaster a day or two later that Winnie had refused to let them go without her! The odd thing, my informant said, was that there was no attempt on the parents' part to put the child down. The children, he said, are masters of the situation in these parts: the way they lorded it over their parents had amazed him when he first came from a Midland district to live among them.
But I must say for the little ones that they do not as a rule abuse their authority. They are so healthy, and have such happy and affectionate dispositions, that they do behave very well. Winnie was an exceptionally naughty little maid and required some such drastic method as that which Solomon advocated, but for the generality the system in favour is after all the one best suited to them.
