Page:Footprints of former men in far Cornwall.djvu/27

 answered Ethelwolf the king; "largess! be it whatsoever it may." Then said Morwenna: "Sir, there is a stern and stately headland in thy appanage of the Tamar-land, it is a boundary rugged and tall, and it looks along the Severn Sea; they call it in that Keltic region Hennacliff—that is to say, the Raven's Crag—because it hath ever been for long ages the haunt and the home of the birds of Elias. Very often, from my abode in wild Wales, have I watched across the waves until the westering sun fell red upon that Cornish rock, and I have said in my maiden vows, 'Alas! and would to God a font might be hewn and an altar built among the stones by yonder barbarous hill.' Give me, then, as I beseech thee, my lord the king, a station for a messenger and a priest in that scenery of my early prayer, that so and through me the saying of Esaias the seer may come to pass, 'In the place of dragons, where each lay, there may be grass with reeds and rushes.'"

Her voice was heard; her entreaty was fulfilled. They came at the cost and impulse of Morwenna; they brought and they set up yonder font, with the carved cable coiled around it in stone, in memory of the vessel of the fishermen of the East anchored in the Galilaean Sea. They built there altar and arch, aisle and device in stone. They linked their earliest structure with