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 CRANTOCK, NEWQUAY, MAWGAN 273 and burials, but on Sundays they go in greater numbers to the chapel or meeting-house. In those people whom we classify, often wrongly, as Celtic, there seems to be something that the Anglican Church does not wholly satisfy, though it is necessary to speak with reserve on such a matter. They can be devout Catholics, as in Ireland, or zealous Dissenters, as in Wales and the West of England ; perhaps these manifesta- tions of the religious spirit, seemingly so opposed, have yet a common feature in allowing more play to the fancy. Dissent has one great charm for all country-folk — it gives them a large share in its activities, it allows them to preach and to pray. This is certainly one secret of its success, not limited to Cornwall. Even a parson like Hawker, beloved by all his parishioners as he was, could not win them from Dissent. There is a chance that the priests of Rome will step in and win where the parish clergyman has partly failed. More than twenty years since, Richard Jefferies wrote about the tonsured priest becoming a power in English country lanes. Here in the West Country hundreds of rich acres are held by the monastic orders. The country parson has now to fight against his old opponent, the Methodist or Baptist, and his older opponent, the priest of Rome. But the winds that sweep across the meadows and sand-dunes, the waves that lap peacefully or dash thunderously, tell us nothing of these old and often dismal quarrels. They are but secular things after all ; the things that are eternal reach deeper than creed or vestment. We do not ask what fetish or totem the sleepers in the grassy barrows believed in ; we may ask if they lived their lives truly and