Then he stared again and finally waved his arm towards the hill I had descended from, strewn all over with huge boulders and masses of granite, and added, "All you've got to do is to use your own eyes and they'll show you where we get stone to build houses with!"
I was obliged to explain that I had only asked that preposterous question in fun: then he calmed down and stood silent for some time, with eyes resting on a chunk of granite at his feet, revolving the matter in his mind, but he did not appear to think there was anything very funny in it. But the extraordinary thing was that after he had quite got over the uncomfortable feeling I had given him—the suspicion, perhaps, that his interlocutor was not quite right in his head—he proved as lively and agreeable a talker as I have met among the Cornish people of his class, and gave me an entertaining account of the various occupations he had followed since the tin-mine in which he had worked as a boy had been abandoned. He was, in fact, a very intelligent fellow, with nice feelings and sentiments, and as pleasant to talk with as any one could be without a sense of humour.
When we look for something and find it not our non-success is apt to produce a dogged spirit in us and we go on looking even after our reason has assured us that the object sought for is not there, or has no existence. That is how it was with me; I was determined to find that rarity in Cornwall—a man with a sense of humour. And in my quest I did not hold my tongue about my encounter with the stone-digger; I told it to at least a dozen persons and they one and all received it coldly. The last one was a farmer; he listened attentively, then after an interval of silence remarked, "Yes, I see; the man did not understand your question in the sense you meant. It was a joke and he took it seriously; I see." He saw but he didn't smile, and I thereupon resolved never again to tell the story of the man digging granite in a ploughed field to any one in Cornwall.
Another instance of this curious child-like simplicity of mind in the native was almost painful.
[Original]
To have one's words taken literally in some cases produces the uncomfortable feeling that there is something wrong with the brain of the person spoken to. I was walking on the moor one day in spring in oppressingly warm weather when, on passing close by a small farm-house, I caught sight of the farmer standing outside and stopped to have a little talk with him.
He was a handsome intelligent fellow with a very pleasing expression, and in a few minutes we were talking and laughing like old friends. "How far is it to Zennor?" I said; "I'm walking there." He answered that it was exactly five miles from his door. "Then," I returned, "I wish you could tell me how to get there without going through the intervening space." He looked strangely puzzled. "Wel——" he began, and then stopped and cast down his eyes. "Really—I don't quite see—————" he started again, and again stopped, more puzzled than ever. Then he made a desperate effort to grapple with the problem. "You see, it's this way," he said; "the space is there—you can't get over that, and so I can't quite make out how————-" But I was sorry to see him distressed and quickly changed the subject, to his great relief.
I was told by the vicar of a parish I was staying in that one had always to remember that the Cornish people take what is said literally; if you forget this and inadvertently make use of some little figure of speech so common in conversation that it is hard not to use it, you are apt to get into trouble. The vicar himself, after twenty years' intimate relations with his parishioners, was liable to little slips of this kind, as I found. One day when I was there a man from a neighbouring hamlet came to the village and by chance met the vicar. "Why, Mr. So-and-so," exclaimed the latter, shaking hands with him, "it's a hundred years since I saw you!" Then after a little friendly talk they separated. But that unlucky phrase stuck in the man's mind, and he spent most of the day in going into the houses of all his intimates in the village and discussing the subject with them. "He said it were a hundred years since he saw me—now what did parson mean by that?" When, anxious to make a little mischief (having nothing else to do), I reported the matter to the vicar, he slapped his leg angrily and exclaimed, "That's how it is with them! There's an instance for you!" But it was a very delightful one, and in another moment his vexation vanished in a burst of laughter.