e, up and down steep paths and along the very
brink of a fearful precipice, with as much coolness as if his sight was
as clear and his step as firm as in his youth. When he had shown me all
that he could show, and had thoroughly exhausted himself with talking, I
gave him a shilling at parting. He appeared to be perfectly astonished
by a remuneration which the reader will doubtless consider the reverse
of excessive; thanked me at the top of his voice; and then led me, in a
great hurry, and with many mysterious nods and gestures, to a hollow in
the grass, where he had spread on a clean pocket-handkerchief a little
stock-in-trade of his own, consisting of barnacles, bits of rock and
ore, and specimens of dried seaweed. Pointing to these, he told me to
take anything I liked, as a present in return for what I had given him.
He would not hear of my buying anything; he was not, he said, a regular
guide, and I had paid him more already than such an old man was
worth--what I took out of his handkerchief I must take as a present
only. I saw by his manner that he would be really mortified if I
contested the matter with him, so as a present I received one of his
pieces of rock--I had no right to deny him the pleasure of doing a kind
action, because there happened to be a few more shillings in my pocket
than in his.

Nothing can be much better adapted to show how simple and
unsophisticated the Cornish character still remains in many respects,
than Cornish notions of organizing a public festival, and Cornish
enjoyment of that festival when it is organized. We had already seen how
they managed a public boat-race at Looe, and we saw again how they
conducted the preparations for the same popular festival, on a larger
scale, at the coast town of Fowey.

In the first place, the dormant public enthusiasm was stimulated by
music at an uncomfortably early hour in the morning. Two horn players
and a clarionet player; a fat musician who blew through a very small
fife and kept time with his head; and a withered little man who beat
furiously on a mighty drum--drew up in martial array, one behind the
other, before the principal inn. Two boys, staring about them in a
stolidly important manner, and carrying flags which bore a suspicious
resemblance to India pocket handkerchiefs sewn together, formed in front
of the musicians. Two corpulent, solemn, elderly gentlemen in black
(belonging, apparently, to the churchwarden-type of the human species),