Page:The Cornwall coast.djvu/252

 246 THE CORNWALL COAST common much further east, is still an important actuality to all the Land's End fishing ports. The typical Cornishman has always been a fisher or a tin-miner ; and both still flourish. Picturesque and artistic St. Ives clusters narrowly about the harbour and on the neck of the Island ; the more modern residences and lodging-houses stretch above Porthminster Beach, with a popular development at Carbis Bay. More inland suburbs are chiefly devoted to the mining that has suffered so many vicissitudes — flourish- ing, then decadent, and now flourishing again. One such centre is Halsetown, a mining settle- ment founded something less than a century ago by James Halse, of the old Cornwall Hals family ; he was a solicitor and a mayor of St. Ives, in- timately connected with the mines. But in this rather unattractive quarter we are less likely to think of Halse than we are of Sir Henry Irving, who spent his childhood here. The reputation of a great actor becomes very much a phantom affair after a few years; but as we still associate the name of Garrick with a brilliant period of the Georgian age, so the name of Irving must always be linked with the later brilliant period of the Victorian. To the younger generation of theatre- goers he is fast becoming like a half-mythical demigod — one of those whom the elder folk mention with regretful shakings of the head when newer favourites are lauded. The actor was not born in Cornwall, but in Somerset ; his mother, however, was a Cornish woman named Behenna, and one of his aunts was Mrs. Penberthy, wife of Captain Isaac Penberthy, whose captaincy of course referred to his position as overseer of mines here at Halsetown. Hither Irving was