Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/526

516[May 1, 1869] water—"having a pen'orth of sea," they call it—or in boating parties with music.

On the west side of Mount's Bay, the crow visits the village of Mousehole, because there, in 1778, aged one hundred and two, died old Dolly Pentreath, the last person who habitually spoke Cornish, which almost exactly resembled the Celtic of Wales, the Highlands, and Britany. There are no printed books in Cornish. Dr. Moreman, of Menheniot, in the reign of Henry the Eighth, was the first who taught his parishioners the Lord's Prayer in English. In 1640, at Feock, near Truro, the Sacrament was administered in Cornish; and in 1678 sermons in Cornish were preached near the Lizard Point. In 1700 the language was still spoken by the tinners and fishermen of St. Just, and round Mount's Bay. In 1758 the language had ceased to be spoken, and in 1776 there were but four or five persons living who could speak the language.

Almost every cove and headland round the Land's End has its legend. One of the wildest is told of Porthcurnow Cove, near the Logan stone. It is a lonely cove, where St. Levan once dwelt, and still contains the ruins of a small oratory. A spectre ship—a black square-rigged unearthly craft—is often seen here, usually followed by a boat. It comes in from sea about nightfall, when the mists rise, glides up over the sands towards Bodelan, and vanishes at Chygwiden. No crew are visible in the spectre ship, and bad fortune follows those who see the phantom vessel. At St. Ives, on stormy nights, a lady with a lantern is seen moving over the rocks on the east side of the island. They say it is the ghost of a lady who, long ago, lost her child in a wreck, but was herself saved.

The most weird legend, however, is that of Forth Towan. They tell you there that a fisherman, walking one still night on the sands, heard a voice from the sea exclaim, three times:

At the third cry a black figure appeared on the top of the hill, paused for a moment, then rushed down the cliffs over the sands, and was lost in the sea.

And now one flight more brings the crow to Pedn-an-Laaz, the, that great pile of granite that thrusts itself forward, the very bowsprit of England, into the Atlantic waves. Its great cliffs are darkened with the salt spray of the sea mists, its caverns moan ceaselessly as with the voices of imprisoned spirits. Gulls and cormorants watch on its ledges and clefts for the bodies of the drowned that are cast on shore. Those strange rocks, the Shark's Fin and the Armed Knight, rise breast high in the yeasty sea like giants wading out to the cluster of rocks where the Longships Lighthouse raises its beacon star. On a clear morning from the Land's End a keen eye can just distinguish the islands of Scilly, nine leagues distant, like faint blue clouds in the horizon. Between these Cassiterides of the Phœnicians, who came to Cornwall to trade for tin, and the Land's End, lies the buried Lyonesse, the country that King Arthur hunted over. There used to be a horseshoe cut on the edge of the precipice to the left of the Land's End, to commemorate a narrow escape which occurred there. An officer, quartered at Falmouth, and on a visit to Penzance, laid a bragging wager that he would ride to the very extreme point of the Land's End. He was already far along the dangerous, lofty, and narrow path, when his horse, frightened by the feather in his master's cap, began backing obstinately towards the yawning precipice. The rider leaped off, but the bridle caught in the buttons of his coat, and he was dragged to the very brink of the rocks before his companions could disengage him. The horse rolled over and was dashed to pieces on the beach.

And now the crow, turning again for a quick flight back to the gold cross upon St. Paul's, from whence he must soon venture forth eastward, strikes out his black wings, upborne by the west wind fresh from the Atlantic, for his sooty home in the great city.

a song of a publican,
 * A wicked man was he,

And he kept the Goat and Compasses
 * For thirty years and three.

To all the people round about,
 * He sold no end of beer:

Very strong beer it was, I wot,
 * "In the season of the year."

We drank it, drank it, night and day,
 * I and my mates, each one,

Though we little knew what kind of a brew
 * Came out of the landlord's tun.

It put strange fancies in our heads,
 * Leastways it did in mine:

Except when I happened to fall asleep,
 * Unconscious as a swine.

I found the secret out at last,
 * I need not tell you how.

He served the beer as they serve the milk,
 * By the help of the iron cow.

And had it been no wuss than this,
 * It were a cruel sin,

But he made it wuss a wery great deal
 * By the pisons he put in.

He made it strong with deadly drugs,
 * The bigger fools were we,

To drink and pay for such rascal stuff
 * For thirty years and three.

But, as I've said, I found him out,
 * And vowed to drink no more,

Lest I should stand in the felon's dock,
 * Or knock at the workhouse door.

Dick who drank it for ten long year,
 * Murder'd his blessed wife:

Which he wouldn't ha' done unless for the beer,
 * For he loved her more than life.

And Tom went wrong, and Dick went dead,
 * And Joe went out of his mind,

While Bill and Sam ran right away,
 * And left their wives behind.

And many other fine fellows I knew,
 * Grew old afore their time,

Or could not get a job of work,
 * To keep their hands from crime.