224 THE LAND'S END 



intense, and that rare phenomenon in West Cornwall, 

 a severe frost, began, which lasted several days, and 

 was said by some of the old natives to be the greatest 

 frost in forty years, while others affirmed they had not 

 experienced anything like it in their lives. 



I was staying at Zennor at the time that lonely 

 little village nestling among its furze thickets and 

 stone hedges, with the rough granite hills, clothed in 

 brown dead bracken, before it and the black granite 

 cliffs and sea behind. I had been amusing myself by 

 feeding a few birds that came to the door, and now 

 my small company of pensioners, suddenly grown 

 tame, began to interest me very much. There was no 

 garden to the house, which was situated in the centre 

 of the village, with the church on one side and the 

 inn on the other nothing but the road, broadening 

 out into a wide bare space on which my window 

 looked, with a stone hedge and a fountain of gushing 

 water on the other side, where the people dipped their 

 buckets and the animals came to drink. Here the 

 cows came on their way to and from the farm, and the 

 pigs and dogs and a flock of geese ; and as some of 

 these animals were always about, they very naturally 

 helped themselves to the bread they found in the 

 public road. Fortunately the ground-floor window 

 had a raised stone platform before it, surrounded by 

 iron railings, and I started putting out the food for 

 the birds in this area. The cows and pigs could not 

 get in there, but some of the most intelligent of the 

 village dogs managed to get a share by thrusting their 

 paws far in and dragging the scraps out, and the geese 



