108 THE LAND'S END 



brown study while listening all the time, and they, 

 seeing me absorbed in my own thoughts, as they 

 imagined, have dropped quite naturally into their 

 own familiar lingo. 



Here is another instance. There was one cottage 

 I always liked to visit to sit for an hour with the 

 family and sometimes have a meal with them just for 

 the pleasure of listening to the wife, a thin, active, 

 voluble woman, who was a remarkably good speaker, 

 and what was even more to me, a lover of all wild 

 creatures a rare thing in a Cornish peasant. Or 

 perhaps I should say all creatures save one the 

 adder. Once, she told me, when she was a little girl 

 she was running home over the furze-grown hill from 

 school when she came upon an adder in the act of 

 devouring a nestful of fledglings. She stood still and 

 gazed, horror-stricken, as it slowly bolted bird after 

 bird, and then fled home crying with grief and pain 

 at what she had witnessed, and never from that day 

 had she seen or thought of an adder without shudder- 

 ing. Now it almost invariably happened that in 

 relating her experiences she would become excited at 

 the most interesting part, and in her heat speak more 

 and more rapidly and change from plain understand- 

 able English to " naughty English " or " proper 

 Cornish," and so cause me to lose the very point of 

 the story. Tonkin, the Cornish historian, when the 

 old language was well - nigh dead, described the 

 people's speech as a jargon " the peculiarity of which 

 was a striking uncertainty of the speaker as to where 

 one word left off and another began." 



