CHAPTER X AN IMPRESSION OF PENZANCE
Value of first impressions—Market day in Penzance—Cornish cows—The main thoroughfare—Characteristics—Temperance in drink—A foreigner on English drinking habits—Irish intemperance—The craving for drink—False ideas—Wales—Methodism and temperance—Carew's testimony—Conclusion.
PLACES are like faces—a first sight is almost invariably the one that tells you most. When the first sharp, clear impression has grown blurred, or is half forgotten or overlaid with subsequent impressions, we have as a rule lost more than we have gained: it is hardly too much to say in a majority of instances that the more familiar a place becomes to us the less well we know it. At all events we have ceased to know it in the same way; we no longer vividly, consciously, see it in its distinctive character.
Here it must be explained that by "place" several things are meant—the appearance of the buildings, if it be a town or village; its scenery and physical conditions generally; and, finally, its inhabitants, their physique, dress, speech and character.
Now that I know Penzance fairly well, having visited it a dozen or twenty times, occasionally staying a week or longer in it, I am glad to be able to go back to my very first impression, which, fortunately, I did not leave wholly to memory.
The first visit was on a Tuesday, which is market day in Penzance, always the best day on which to visit a country town if one is interested in the people and their domestic animals. Although in midwinter, the day was exceptionally mild and very fine, and arriving early, I spent some hours in strolling about the streets, peeping into the churches, and visiting the public gardens, the sea-front and cattle-market. The town itself, despite its fine situation on Mount's Bay, with the famous castle on the island hill, opposite Marazion, on one hand and the bold coast scenery by Newlyn and Mousehole on the other, interested me as little as any country town I have seen. Streets narrow and others narrower still, some straight, some very crooked, with houses on either side, mostly modern, all more or less mean or commonplace in appearance. The market, too, was curiously mean, and the animals poor; it was a surprise to see such cattle in a district which is chiefly dependent on dairy produce. The cows were small, mostly lean and all in an incredibly rough and dirty condition, their haunches, and in many instances half their coats, covered with an old crust of indurated mud and dung. The farmers do nothing to improve their cattle and are not only satisfied to go on keeping these small beasts of no particular breed—a red and white animal which looks like a degenerated Jersey—but it is customary to allow them to breed a year too soon.
[Original]
This, however, is not a question to dogmatise about; one would certainly wish to see the beasts better cared for in the winter months and brought to market in a less filthy state, but I doubt that any improved breed would flourish in the conditions in which these animals exist in the small dairy farms on the stony moors in this rough unsheltered district. The cow of the Land's End country is, in some degree, a product of the place and in harmony with its environment, like the Land's End fox and badger.