'eastering out of the high shadow which reaches beyond the moon,' and
as new nations with _their_ cities and villages, their fields, woods,
mountains, and sea-shores, rise up into the morning-side, lo! Fresh
troops, and still fresh troops, and yet again fresh troops of 'these
small school-going children of the dawn.' . . .

"What are weather and season to this incessant panorama of childhood?
The pigmy people trudge through the snow on moor and hill-side; wade
down flooded roads; are not to be daunted by wind or rain, frost or
the white smother of 'millers and bakers at fisticuffs.' Most
beautiful of all, he sees them travelling schoolward by that late
moonlight which now and again in the winter months precedes the tardy
dawn."

My birthday falls in November month. Here, behind this Cornish window, we
are careful in our keeping of birthdays; we observe them solemnly,
stringent in our cheerful ritual;--and this has been my birthday sermon!

DECEMBER.

Hard by the edge of the sand-hills, and close beside the high road on the
last rise before it dips to the coast, stands a turfed embankment
surrounded by a shallow fosse. This is none of our ancient camps
('castles' we call them in Cornwall), as you perceive upon stepping within
the enclosure, which rises in a complete circle save for two entrances cut
through the bank and facing one another. You are standing in a perfectly
level area a hundred and thirty feet in diameter; the surrounding rampart
rises to a height of eight or nine feet, narrowing towards the top, where
it is seven feet wide; and around its inner side you may trace seven or
eight rows of seats cut in the turf, but now almost obliterated by the
grass.

This Round (as we call it) was once an open-air theatre or planguary
(_plain-an-guare_, place of the play). It has possibly a still older
history, and may have been used by the old Cornish for their councils and
rustic sports; but we know that it was used as a theatre, perhaps as early
as the fourteenth century, certainly as late as the late sixteenth: and,
what is more, we have preserved for us some of the plays performed in it.

They are sacred or miracle plays, of course. If you draw a line from
entrance to entrance, then at right angles to it there runs from the
circumference towards the centre of the area a straight shallow trench,
terminating in a spoon-shaped pit. The trench is now