hip to try."
"Why, father, how can you _ask?_ We must go to the Church, of course--I
saw it from the 'bus--and hear the service in the fine old Cornish
language."

Now, I suspect that the friend to whom I am indebted for this story
introduced a few grace-notes into his report. But it is a moral story in
many respects, and I give it for the sake of the one or two morals which
may be drawn from it. In the first place, absurd as these people appear,
their ignorance but differs by a shade or two from the knowledge of
certain very learned people of my acquaintance. That is to say, they know
about as much concerning the religion of this corner of England to-day as
the archaeologists, for all their industry, know concerning the religion of
Cornwall before it became subject to the See of Canterbury in the reign of
Athelstan, A.D. 925-40; and their hypotheses were constructed on much the
same lines. Nay, the resemblance in method and in the general muddle of
conclusions obtained would have been even more striking had these good
persons mixed up Plymouth Brethren (founded in 1830) with the Pilgrim
Fathers who sailed out of Plymouth in 1620, and are already undergoing the
process of mythopoeic conversion into Deucalions and Pyrrhas of the United
States of America. Add a slight confusion of their tenets with those of
Mormonism, or at least a disposition to lay stress on all discoverable
points of similarity between Puritans and Mormons, and really you have a
not unfair picture of the hopeless mess into which our researchers in the
ancient religions of Cornwall have honestly contrived to plunge themselves
and us. It was better in the happy old days when we all believed in the
Druids; when the Druids explained everything, and my excellent father
grafted mistletoe upon his apple-trees--in vain, because nothing will
persuade the mistletoe to grow down here. But nobody believes in the
Druids just now: and the old question of the Cassiterides has never been
solved to general satisfaction: and the Indian cowrie found in a barrow at
Land's End, the tiny shell which raised such a host of romantic
conjectures and inspired Mr. Canton to write his touching verses:--

"What year was it that blew
The Aryan's wicker-work canoe
Which brought the shell to English land?
What prehistoric man or woman's hand,
With what intent, consigned it to this grave--
This barrow set in sound of the Ancient