1 88 THE LAND'S END 



people, I take it, are Celts with less alien blood in 

 their veins than any other branch of their race in the 

 British Islands. 



One day in a village street I met a fine athletic- 

 looking oldish man with a very marked characteristic 

 Cornish face, but painted by alien suns to deepest 

 brown, and that colour of the tropics contrasted oddly 

 with the bright blue-grey eyes and reddish-grey beard. 

 He laughed when I said that I supposed he was a 

 stranger there. Yes, a stranger in a sense, he said, 

 since he had been away over forty years, working in the 

 mines, in America, Africa and Australia. But his forty 

 years' labour had not hurt him much ; he felt young 

 still and was going back to Queensland after a little 

 look round. For one thing he had never touched 

 alcohol in his life and he would like to pit his strength 

 against that of any man of thirty in that village where 

 he was born sixty-seven years ago. Yes, it was his 

 own native place which he had come back after forty 

 years to have a look at. His people were there still, 

 and had been there to their certain knowledge over 

 six hundred years. And I dare say, he added, if we 

 knew all we could say a thousand. 



Five or ten thousand would perhaps have been 

 nearer the truth. And so it is with the common 

 people generally. They have become great roamers 

 nowadays ; they go forth in hundreds every year into 

 all parts of the world, but they appear to cherish the 

 old Cornish feeling against marrying among strangers ; 

 they return after few or many years to find wives, and 

 that, I conjectured, was the old miner's motive in 



