Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/483

Charles Dickens] The Maricopas, or Co-co-Maricopas, as they are also called, are the remains of a small tribe of Indians which formerly occupied the land about the junction of the Gila and the Colorado; being too few to hold their own amongst the larger tribes of the latter river, they were forced to retire up the Gila, until at last they crossed the Gila desert, and asked the Pimas to allow them to settle with them on their lands. To this request the Pimas consented, and now the only difference to be recognised between them is a moral one. Unchastity in a Pima woman is very rare indeed, but the licentiousness so common amongst the Colorado tribes is still characteristic of the Maricopas.

The Pimas are rather short in stature, darker and less manly in appearance than the Zuñians, and wear, as a rule, less clothes, because they inhabit a much warmer climate. A cotton kilt, or breechcloth, with gaiters and moccasins, is usually the working attire for both sexes, but in the evening the cotton blanket is thrown gracefully over the shoulders, and sometimes fastened with a band round the waist. Besides these simple native garments, they will wear any cast-off clothes which can be obtained from passing travellers; and since intercourse with the outer world has become general, the slow and laborious process of making homespun cloth formerly practised by them has been discontinued. The women are stronger and more robust than the men, probably because they do more work. They grind the corn by a slow process of rubbing it between two stones, the larger of which—the metate—is grooved for that purpose; they hoe the ground, carry most of the burdens, gather mezquite beans from the neighbouring hills, make baskets and pottery, and occasionally weave and spin, in addition to taking care of the children and household matters. The men attend to the acequia madre common to all, gather in the crops, look after the stock, protect the settlements, and do most of the idling.

Wadebridge and St. Columb, the crow finds a small stone cross, six miles from Padstow. It was here that, in February, 1840, a Mr. Norway was murdered by two brothers named Lightfoot. The footpads were hung at Bodmin, and confessed their crime in all its details. It was considered an extraordinary and miraculous case of presentiment, that the very evening of the murder, the murdered man's brother—chief officer of the Orient, then seven miles N.N.W. of St. Helena—dreamt that he saw the murder perpetrated, observing all its details, except that a house which he well knew to be on the right of the high road, seemed to stand on the left. Now, really, soberly looked at, this story has nothing wonderful about it. A superstitious naval officer, in the evening, on a lonely sea, dreaming of home and his brother—of the dangers of his journeys in wild places, of his possible murder by footpads amongst such wild places, thinks of the specially wild two-mile stone on the road towards St. Columb. Who is there that tells his dreams if they do not come true? There is much more that is difficult to explain in the true and singular story of the Cornish gentleman who dreamt of Perceval's murder, and some time afterwards, going to London, found, to his surprise and almost horror, that the assassin in his dream exactly resembled in dress and features the maniac Bellingham. There had been nothing to prompt that dream, except, perhaps, some vague political anxiety of a Tory partisan for the statesman's life in those troublous times of Luddite riots, general distress, and discontent.

Near St. Columb the crow takes care not to flap his sooty wings too fast over the wooded Carnantow, once the home of that mischievous old lawyer, attorney-general Roy, who revived the odious and tyrannical tax of ship money, till Hampden punctured the legal bubble, and it burst. The old parchment-coloured pedant used to say dryly that his house had no fault save one, it was too near to London. The beautiful valley of Lanherne stretches from St. Columb to the sea-shore and, up the coast the crow catches in perspective the groves of Carnantow, the nunnery of Lanherne, and the old church tower of Mawgan embowered among small-leafed Cornish elms. In the churchyard of St. Mawgan (three miles from St. Columb) there is a memorial of death which is essentially Cornish. It is the stern of a shattered boat, painted white, which preserves the memory of ten poor fishermen, who, on a bitter winter's night in 1846, were drifted ashore in this boat, frozen to death.

It is the fine granite cliffs around Mawgan and Bodrothan steps that that very pleasant artist Mr. Hook delights to paint. The cliff tops bedded with cushions of sea pink, the twenty miles of purple cliffs, the golden and silver sands, the emerald crescents of the bays, the fantastic caverns hollowed for the mermaids, the strange blow holes where the sea spouts like an angry whale, he has painted with a true Englishman's love of ocean; but he must not sink into small mannerism, for there is half England still to paint. At Newquay, not far from that great double entrenched earth-fort of King Arthur's Castle an Dinas, there is a change going on which seems to explain the construction of all the sandstone in England, and that is the consolidation of sand rocks from blown sand by the infiltration of water holding iron in solution.

A flight further westward, and the crow touches at Truro, in the pleasant valley where