A GOOD TRENCHER-MAN

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to visit a friend, who took him out to one of the cheap restaurants in Soho and gave him one of the wonderful eighteenpenny table d'hôte dinners. The repast was, as is usual in those Italian restaurants, ample, and the viands various soup, fish, joint, vegetables, sweets, cheese, and all for eighteenpence. The Cornishman took each course with avidity and great gusto-he polished off everything. When the meal was finished and black coffee had been despatched, the Londoner asked his Cornish friend how he had enjoyed the meal. "Immensely," said the Cornishman. 66 Have another with me."

"THE

CHAPTER XXVII

SANCREED AND ITS CROSSES

HE world forgetting, by the world forgot" appropriately sums up the position of Sancreed at the present time. Some day it is not improbable the world may awake to a knowledge of Sancreed's existence. When it does it will be seen that this remote Cornish village possesses attractions which only require to be known to be appreciated that is by a certain section of the public. The public that loves hustle and bustle, the roar of trams and the hoots of motors; that sees nothing unnatural in black carbon pouring out of tall chimneys; that likes to jostle along crowded streets and look in glaring shop-windows, will never like Sancreed. That is well also for Sancreed.

At present Sancreed lies neglected, and for the pertinent reason that it reposes in peaceful slumber away from highways, thoroughfares, and the busy haunts of men. You cannot take it on the main route anywhere. You have to go out of the ordinary rut of tourists and pleasure-seekers to get there, so that unless you were told what an interesting place it was, in the ordinary course of events you would never visit it.

Between the main road running from Penzance to Land's End and that from Penzance to St. Just, Sancreed is to be found; but it requires looking for, just as do sweet violets. If you be fond of exactitude, you may be glad to know that Sancreed lies six miles and a half nearly north-east from Land's End, and three and a half nearly due west of Pen

zance.

The Sancreed I have specially in mind is not the whole of the large, bare, down-covered, breezy parish bearing the name, which covers some thousands of acres and contains a very scattered population of less than eight hundred souls all told, but is the sweet centre of the parochial existence

A RESTFUL OASIS

257 of the place, crystallising around and associated with church, vicarage, glebe farm, and school. This perfectly peaceful and restful oasis of the old-time life (some of it very, very old-time, as we shall see), mellowed with memories of the past, as are its ancient church and still more ancient Celtic crosses with venerable grey lichens and other weatherworn evidences of advanced age, is the Sancreed I mean.

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The grey granite church, with the vicarage snugly nestling close beside it on the north-west side, is simply embosomed in a grove of sycamore trees, lofty and graceful, from whose feathery summits come the almost never-ceasing caw, caw" of numberless rooks. From the belfry windows may be seen flitting in and out an occasional jackdaw, and perhaps "amid the sticks and the straw," ends of which protrude and are clearly visible, who knows but one might find a ring or other relic in the nest of "that little jackdaw"?

Opposite the grey-stoned and lichened sacred edifice, just across the road, is the plain, solidly built glebe farmhouse, set well back in a recess from the thoroughfare, with a well in front (now closed in and surmounted with a pump), looking altogether very much like an old-fashioned wayside inn. In fact it used to be an inn, "The Bird in Hand," but some twenty years ago the then vicar relinquished the licence after a man had fallen into the well on his way home, and not being accustomed to cold water, or indeed water of any temperature, had suffered from the immersion. Evidences of its tavern days are still visible inside, though where the old signboard went I know not. The little back parlour, which was formerly the bar, still has affixed to the walls the ancient settles in which sat the local politicians and gossips.

The present occupier of the glebe farm, Mr. Stevens, is warden of the church over the way, and runs the farm chiefly as a butter and poultry producing business, and is himself in perfect keeping with the harmonies of the place. He told me that once he went as far as Truro, whither he had been summoned as a juryman, that being the extent of his wanderings from the Land's End, and when I mentioned the metropolis he replied, "London is not in my district."

S