Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/514



ILL you come to the Cassiterides with me?

I please myself a little with that word, "Cassiterides," for the probabilities are that you have not the remotest idea of its meaning. Yet it has a fine old classical ring about it, and may vaguely suggest to your mind the ancient, dream-wrapped islands of the Hesperides, or the stormy Egean cyclades, not to mention cantharides, and the fatal ides of March. Possibly, if you are rusty in the classics, you may mistake my invitation for a parody upon the familiar ballad which narrates the persistence of a designing spider and the weak vacillation of an unhappy fly. Lest you should accuse me of an intention to perpetrate either poetry or parody, let me hasten to assure you that an invitation to the Cassiterides is merely an invitation to visit the most unfrequented, out- of-the-world corner of England, the Scilly Isles.

Eighteen centuries ago the Romans conquered the Scilly Islands and planted a penal colony on their inhospitable shores. Thenceforth these islands were derisively designated upon the maps of the period as the Cassiterides, or Tin Islands. I say "derisively," because they do not now, and probably never did, contain the slightest trace of tin, and hence it is probable that the name originated in the heartless joke of some Roman policeman, who remarked to an unhappy bankrupt en route for his place of banishment, "O you'll find plenty of tin where you're going." That this is a very poor joke indeed is the strongest proof of its probable Roman origin, for these grim old robbers were never capable of originating or recognizing the faintest imitation of a really good joke. The Roman mind appears to have been so constituted—on reflection I decline to discuss in this place the peculiarities of the Roman mind. My text being the Scilly Islands, and this article being decidedly not a sermon, there is no possible reason why the text should be utterly neglected.

If the idea of a brief banishment to the Scilly Islands does not strike you unfavorably, we will start at once. We are at Penzer (you will find that the place is spelled Penzance, on the map), a good-sized town on the Cornish coast, where we embark on board a sloop just setting sail for St. Mary's, the capital of the Scilly group. With a fresh and favoring breeze, we reach St. Mary's in about seven hours, and find ourselves in a flourishing city consisting of one street and about two hundred houses, known to the Scillyian world as Hugh Town.

We are twenty-five miles southwest from Land's End. Although