Newquay is in Cornwall without being Cornish, and is one of the few towns which has no "saint" belonging to it. Most of the towns in the peninsula date back to the days of saints and giants, and then crystallize somehow. Newquay didn't grow that way, and was content to remain until quite recently the habitation of a score of fisher families, who lived by beach-combing and pilchard-seining. If the town of to-day were wiped out, there would remain the old fish-cellars, a few weather-beaten cottages, and the "Huer's hut" on the Headland. Newquay town is a modern creation, and lies between Padstow and St. Ives, which are rich in saints and antiquities, and stand apart and distinct from everything modern, crystallizing around and about, but receiving little of the old life and tones. The original name of the place was Towan Blistra, which sounds genuine. The growth of Newquay is no miracle. People who went there for their health got better, and then the "faculty" said, "Try Newquay;" then the Great Western Railway took up the cry, and shouted, "Try Newquay;" and that's all the process.

The sea and rocks, and sands and caves, are all genuine. The fine hotels are fine hotels, and fine hotels after their style are new in this part of the world. The houses have a hurried, built-by-contract look about them, and the whole place wants to be built over again, and built differently. Most of the inhabitants now are Cornish in a transition state, so you don't know quite where you are. The hotel porter was regal; the man in charge of the lift was imported with the machine, and when asked, said he thought a "piskie" was a new crank, or something like that, for working the lift. Newquay is like that now. You go there for the air, and you get it until every nerve is braced, and you get rid of the dismals, and eat and drink and sleep, until you find that the one pleasure of life is living, simply that. Even Cornish people come to Newquay to be toned. The Bookworm lost his restlessness at night entirely here, and no longer read strange books in his sleep.

If you want to talk with a real Newquay man, you will find him on the Headland, looking at the sea. We scraped acquaintance with one watching his nets dry on the grass. He told us he hadn't heard about piskies lately. When he was a boy, and fish was cured in the old cellars, and the Headland was the Headland, and no mistake about it, and when a fisherman was a fisherman, and everything was as it ought to be, and had been from time "back along," why, then, there were piskies, of course. Everything was different now, and he would not be surprised if piskies were never heard of any more. Guy said gently that that might be a good thing, but the man ironed out all intelligence from his face and said nothing. He did not wish to have old memories stirred just then.

The old men wandering about the Headland always looked seaward when talked to, as though they were sure of the sea, and the rocks, and the beaches; all else, round and about, was slipping from them—new houses, new streets, crowds of people in strange garments, and such faces! worn and wisht! why did they pitch upon this place? Guy said these old grumblers were very ungrateful. A fine town had sprung up, money poured into the place, and nothing was taken from it, and the old boys were not thankful. The Bookworm took the side of the native, and said no one liked the place which he called his own, and had grown to love, to be transformed by strange hands so suddenly. What did the ancient Briton think of the Roman villa with tesselated floors, and hot and cold baths, and clothes mended on the while-you-wait system? Much better, no doubt, than British huts and blue paint, but not to the native taste. A diet of Chablis and oysters disagreed at first with a stomach used to whelks and gingerbeer.

Variety is one of the attractions of the county. For a tourist who rides a bike or a motor, the variety is perpetual, and he must pull up even now and again and ask himself what has become of the last sensation. If you can rely upon your legs, you had best walk from village to village until you are where you wish to be. To lose one's self is an advantage sometimes; and you can't go very far wrong. When at Newquay, breathing in the Atlantic on the north, you are only twenty miles from your friends breathing in the soft airs of the sunny south. The tramp across the country, from north to south, is simply delicious. First of all, there are the moors, springy to the foot, restful to the eye, and the "coombes" running seawards and catching sunbeams, so that you get opposing lines of light and shadow, and charm everywhere.

We made our way from Newquay to Roche, one of the portals to the land of the white men—a wonderful land, producing the white clay which is shipped to all quarters of the globe. The heathen Chinee has found it out, and buys it in lumps. At first, he used to buy it by the yard in his calico. The Lancashire merchant bought the white clay and worked it into his inferior cotton goods, and John Chinaman paid extra for the loaded yarn. The heathen learnt the secret in the course of time, imported the clay, loaded his own yarn, and put the profit into his own pocket. Then the "Yellow peril" was talked about.

All the white patches in the hills and valleys visible from here spell "kaolin," or "china clay," and everything that china clay touches is white; white waggons piled up with square white blocks travel along white, dusty roads, drawn by white-powdered horses, driven by men as white as ghosts in the last stages of galloping consumption.

"Fish, tin, and copper," was the old commercial toast; but china clay has come in and taken a front seat. It is only a hundred and fifty years ago since a long-nosed Quaker found out that the stuff was good for pottery; and then chemists came in and found there was money in it for manufacturers of cotton and paper; and now the society beauty may have the satisfaction of knowing that her fair cheek is made fairer still by honest china clay most delicately perfumed. The men and women who handle the clay get the same stuff for nothing, and do well enough without the perfume. China clay, being a modern industry in this land of ancients, has no piskie, or nuggie, or bucca connected with it, and Guy took kindly to it on that account, saying it represented the practical, hard-headed twentieth century. Who would buy Cornwall for its legends, he would like to know! Whereas all the world was buying mountains of china clay. He supposed if this long-nosed old Quaker had lived a thousand or two years ago he would have been turned into a piskie, and a fine crop of legends would have sprung up. We failed to trace any legend or folk-lore about china clay. It was all modern—modern discovery, modern uses, modern shipments; the only thing fabulous seemed to be the inexhaustible supply and the value of certain spots free from impurities. One might almost fancy legend at work—the wicked giant and the sainted virgin crumbling into kaolin rather than be the heroine of the romance with wedding bell accompaniment.

We came to a rock where there is a well which is said to ebb and flow with the tide; only it doesn't. The water is said to be brackish, which it probably is; but a reverend canon, writing on the spot, warned visitors against tasting it on that account. All brackish water does not come from the sea. However, this was a holy well once on a time, and young people even now drop bent pins into it and wish. It is very simple, and costs nothing. Then there is the cell in which St. Roche lived until he died, and then, the apartment being light and airy, and 680 feet above the sea, was occupied by successive saints. At present the apartment is unoccupied, but the parish is taking care of it. This is the cell wherein the damned soul of Tregeagle tried to find sanctuary when pursued by the fiends from Dozmary Pool. The inhabitants of the wild and desolate region between Roche and Dozmary hear the hell-hounds pursuing the shrieking soul on dark tempestuous nights, and on Christmas Eve the hunt is said to be on a grand scale. The inhabitants of the moors keep indoors after dark. The story is told in—

There is a lot of moorland about here, and a Cornish moor, with its poor soil and windswept bracken, turning brown and golden before its time, its gallant heaths struggling amongst the rocks, or blooming grandly in sheltered patches, tells its tale of hardship. There is not much to be seen generally but rough ponies running wild, and rabbits and wild birds innumerable. A moor is not much of a place for a lonely man with sad indigestion bad upon him.

This was our first real experience of a Cornish moor, and we walked along gaily enough for a time; but conversation languished, for each was impressed in his own way by the immense void upon the earth. Whichever way we looked, there was nothing beyond speaking of limit to rolling moorland—the hills were only gaunt sentinels to a greater silence. To come from a city with millions treading on the heels of millions, and people in despair of getting breathing room, and then to find one's self upon a moor, is to experience a new sensation. Guy suddenly sent up a shout, sprinted a hundred yards and back again, and then wanted the Bookworm to "tuck in his tup'ny"—the loneliness had got upon his nerves, but he felt better after this performance. The story of Tregeagle hunted by hell-hounds had its origin in a locality more desolate than this, and the Bookworm said he was convinced that locality had much to do with the making and colouring of myths.