cross of stone stands,
sloping towards the earth, at a little distance off--soon perhaps to
share the fate of the prostrate ruins about it. How changed the scene
here, since the time when the rural christening procession left the
church, to proceed down the quiet pathway to the Holy Well--when
children were baptized in the pure spring; and vows were offered up
under the roof of the Oratory, and prayers were repeated before the
sacred cross! These were the pious usages of a past age; these were the
ceremonies of an ancient church, whose innocent and reverent custom it
was to connect closer together the beauty of Nature and the beauty of
Religion, by such means as the consecration of a spring, or the erection
of a roadside cross. There has been something of sacrifice as well as of
glory, in the effort by which we, in our time, have freed ourselves from
what was superstitious and tyrannical in the faith of the times of
old--it has cost us the loss of much of the better part of that faith
which was not superstition, and of more which was not tyranny. The
spring of St. Clare is nothing to the cottager of our day but a place to
draw water from; the village lads now lounge whistling on the fallen
stones, once the consecrated arches under which their humble ancestors
paused on the pilgrimage, or knelt in prayer. Wherever the eye turns,
all around it speaks the melancholy language of desolation and
decay--all but the water of the Holy Well. Still the little pool remains
the fitting type of its patron saint--pure and tranquil as in the bygone
days, when the name of St. Clare was something more than the title to a
village legend, and the spring of St. Clare something better than a
sight for the passing tourist among the Cornish moors.[1]

We happened to arrive at the well at the period when the villagers were
going home to dinner. After the first quarter of an hour, we were left
almost alone among the ruins. The only person who approached to speak to
us was a poor old woman, bent and tottering with age, who lived in a
little cottage hard by. She brought us a glass, thinking we might wish
to taste the water of the spring; and presented me with a rose out of
her garden. Such small scraps of information as she had gathered
together about the well, she repeated to us in low, reverential tones,
as if its former religious uses still made it an object of veneration in
her eyes. After a time, she too quitted us; and we were then left quite