There is a small outlying hamlet[138] in my parochial charge, about two miles from my vicarage, with a population of about two hundred souls, inhabiting a kind of plateau shut in by lofty hills and skirted by the sea. These rural and simple-hearted people, secluded by their remote place of abode from the access of the surrounding world, present a striking picture of old and Celtic England such as it existed two or three hundred years ago. A notion of their solitude and simplicity may be gathered from the fact that, whereas they have no village postman or office, their only mode of intercourse with the outer life of their kind is accomplished through the weekly or other visit of their clergyman. He carries their letters, which contain “the short and simple annals of the poor,” and he receives and returns their weekly and laborious literary compositions to edify and instruct their distant and more civilised correspondents. The address on each letter is often such as to baffle all ordinary curiosity, and unless deciphered by the skill of the experts of the post-office, must often furnish hieroglyphics for the study of the Postmaster-General as obscure, if not so antique, as the legends on a pyramid or Rosetta stone. A visit to a distant market-town is an achievement to render a man an authority or an oracle among his brethren; and one who has accomplished that journey twice or thrice is ever regarded as a daring traveller, and consulted about foreign countries with a feeling of habitual respect.

They have amongst them no farrier for their cattle, no medical man for themselves, no beerhouse, no shop; a man who travels for a distant town supplies them with tea by the ounce, or sugar in smaller quantities still. Not a newspaper is taken in throughout the hamlet, although they are occasionally astonished and delighted by the arrival from some almost forgotten friend in Canada of an ancient copy of the Toronto Gazette. This publication they pore over to weariness, and on Sunday they will worry the clergyman with questions about Transatlantic places and names of which he is obliged to confess himself utterly ignorant, a confession which consciously lowers him in their veneration and respect. An ancient dame once exhibited her Prayer-book, very nearly worn out, printed in the reign of George II., and very much thumbed at the page from which she assiduously prayed for the welfare of Prince Frederick, without one misgiving that she violated the article of our Church which forbids prayer for the dead.

Among the singular traits of character which are developed amid these, whom I may designate in the German phrase as my mossy[139] parishioners, there is one which I should define, in their extreme simplicity, as exuberant belief, or rather faith in excess. I do not, however, intend by this term any kind of religious peculiarity of tenet or creed, but only a prostration of the intellect before certain old traditionary and inherited impulses of the human mind. They share and they embrace those instinctive tendencies of their Celtic nature which in all ages have led their race to cherish a credence in the existence and power of witches, fairies, and the force of charms and spells. It is well known that all such supernatural influences on ordinary life are singularly congenial to the ancient and the modern Cornish mind. I do not exaggerate when I affirm at all events my own persuasion, that two-thirds of the total inhabitants of Tamar-side implicitly believe in the power of the Mal Occhio, as the Italians name it, or the Evil Eye. Is this incredible in a day when the spasms and raps and bad spelling of a familiar spirit are received with acquiescent belief in polished communities, and even in intellectual London? The old notion that a wizard or a witch so became by a nefarious bargain with the enemy of man, and by a surrender of his soul to his ultimate grasp, although still held in many a nook of our western valleys, and by the crooning dame at her solitary hearth, appears to have been exchanged in my hamlet of Holacombe (for such is its name) for a persuasion that these choosers of the slain inherit their faculty from their birth. Whispers of forbidden ties between their parents, and of monstrous and unhallowed alliances of which these children are the issue, largely prevail in this village. There it is held that the witch, like the poet, is so born. I have been gravely assured that there are well-known marks which distinguish the ill-wishers from all beside. These are black spots under the tongue; in number five, diagonally placed: “Like those, sir, which are always found in the feet of swine,”[140] and which, according to the belief of my poor people, and which, as a Scriptural authority, I was supposed unable to deny, were first made in the unclean animals by the entrance of the demons into the ancestral herd at Gadara. A peculiar kind of eyeball, sometimes bright and clear, and at others covered with a filmy gauze, like a gipsy’s eye, as it is said, by night; or a double pupil, ringed twice; or a larger eye on the left than on the right side; these are held to be tokens of evil omen, and accounted to indicate demoniac power, and certain it is that a peculiar glare or a glance of the eye does exist in those persons who are pointed out as in possession of the craft of the wizard or witch. But an ancient man, who lived in a lone house in a gorge near the church, once actually disclosed to me in mysterious whispers, and with many a gesture of alarm and dread, a plan which he had heard from his grandfather, and by which a person evilly inclined, and anxious for more power than men ought to possess, might at any time become a master of the Evil Eye.

“Let him go to chancel,” said he, “to sacrament, and let him hide and bring away the bread[141] from the hands of the priest; then, next midnight let him take it and carry it round the church, widdershins—that is, from south to north,[142] crossing by east three times: the third time there will meet him a big, ugly, venomous toad,[143] gaping and gasping with his mouth opened wide, let him put the bread between the lips of the ghastly creature, and as soon as ever it is swallowed down his throat he will breathe three times upon the man, and he will be made a strong witch for evermore.”

I did not fail to express the horror and disgust with which I had listened to this grandsire’s tale, and to assure him that any man capable of performing such an atrocious ceremony for such a purpose, must be by his very nature fit for every evil desire, and prepared, of his own mere impulse, to form the most unhallowed wishes for the harm of his fellow-creatures, such as a demon only could delight to fulfil. But the feats which are supposed to be achieved by the witch—for the question proposed by the sapient King Jamie has been solved by the Cornish people, whether the Devil doth not oftener dally with ancient women than men—are invariably deeds of loss and harm: Some felon sow, like her of Rokeby,[144] becomes the grunting mother of a large family of farrows; all at once, like Medea,[145] she hates her own offspring with a fiendish hatred, and spurns them all away from her milk. They pine and squeal, and at last sit upright on their hinder parts like pleading children, put their little paws together in piteous fashion, and die one by one. All this would never have come to pass had not the dame, the day before, refused a bottle of milk to one who “should have been a woman,” “but that her beard forbade them to interpret that such she were.” What graphic tales of “things ill-wished” have I not heard around and within this wild and lonely hamlet! All at once a flock or herd would begin to pine away with some strange and nameless disease, the shepherd’s ewes yeaned dead lambs, and were found standing over their lost offspring aghast. Or his cows, “the milky mothers of the herd,” would rush from field to field, “quite mad,” with their tails erect towards the sky, like the bare poles of a ship in distress scudding before the gale; or the brown mare would refuse to be harnessed, and signify her intention to remain in the stall on a busy day, to her master’s infinite disgust. In the more civilised part of my parish the well-to-do farmer would have a remedy. He would mount his horse one break of day on some secret expedition, and be absent for another day or two. Then he returns armed with a packet of white powders, which he scatters carefully, one at every gate on his farm, and his men hear him as he goes muttering in solemn fashion some strange set words, which turn out, when the scroll is submitted to the schoolmaster afterwards, to contain the blessings of the twenty-eighth chapter of Deuteronomy, copied in writing for his use. He has paid a visit, it appears, to a distant town, and been closeted with a well-known public character of the west, popularly called the White Witch, and it is he who has not only exposed the name and arts of the parish practitioner of evil, but has supplied an antidote in the shape of baffling powders and “charms of might.”

Some years agone a violent thunderstorm passed over the hamlet of Holacombe, and wrought great damage in its course. Trees were rooted up, cattle killed, and a rick or two set on fire. It so befell that I visited, the day after, one of the chief agricultural inhabitants of the village, and I found the farmer and his men standing by a ditch wherein lay, heels upward, a fine young horse quite dead. “Here sir,” he shouted, as I came on, “only please to look! is not this a sight to see?” I looked at the poor animal, and uttered my sympathy and regret at the loss.

“One of the fearful results,” I happened to say, “of the storm and lightning yesterday.” “There, Jem,” said he to one of his men, triumphantly, “didn’t I say the parson would find it out? Yes, sir,” he said, “it is as you say: it is all that wretched old Cherry[146] Parnell’s doing, with her vengeance and her noise!” I stared with astonishment at this unlooked-for interpretation which he had put into my mouth, and waited for him to explain. “You see, sir,” he went on to say, “the case was this: old Cherry came up to my place, tottering along and mumbling that she wanted a fagot of wood. I said to her, ‘Cherry,’ says I, ‘I gave you one only two days agone, and another two days before that, and I must say that I didn’t make up my woodrick altogether for you.’ So she turned away, looking very grany, and muttering something about ‘Hotter for me hereafter.’ Well, sir, last night I was in bed, I and my wife, and all to once there bursted a thunderbolt, and shaked the very room and house. Up we started, and my wife says, ‘O father, old Cherry’s up! I wish I had gone after her with that there fagot.’ I confess I thought in my mind I wish she had; but it was too late then, and I would try to hope for the best. But now, sir, you see with your own eyes what that revengeful old woman hath been and done. And I do think, sir,” he went on to say, changing his tone to a kind of indignant growl—“I do think that when I call to mind how I’ve paid tithe and rates faithfully all these years, and kept my place in church before your reverence every Sabbath-day, and always voted in the vestries that what hath a be ought to be, and so on, I do think that such ones as old Cherry Parnell never ought to be allowed to meddle with such things as thunder and lightning.” What could I—what could any man in his senses—say to this?

The great charmer of charms[147] in this strange corner of the world is a seventh son born in direct succession from one father and one mother. Find such a person, and you have “the sayer of good words” always at your command. He is called in our folk-lore the doctor of the district. There is such an old man in my hamlet, popularly called Uncle Tony Cleverdon. He was baptised Anthony; but this has been changed by kindly village parlance and the usage of the West. For with us the pet name is generally the short name, and any one venerable from age and amiable in nature is termed, without relationship, but merely for endearment, “uncle” and “aunt.”[148] Uncle Tony has inherited this endowment in a family of thirteen children, he being the seventh born. He often says that his lucky birth has been as good as “a fortin” to him all his life; for although he is forbidden by usage and tradition to take money for the exercise of his functions, nothing has hindered that he should always be invited to sit as an honoured guest at the table furnished with good things in the houses of his votaries. Uncle Tony allowed me, as a vast favour, to take down from his lips some of his formularies: they had never been committed to writing before, he said; not, as I believe, for more than three centuries, for they smack of the Middle Ages. He very much questioned whether their virtue would not be utterly destroyed when he was gone, by their being “put into ink.”

Uncle Tony was like an ancient augur in the science of birds. “Whenever you see one magpie alone by himself,” said he, with a look of inimitable sagacity, “that bird is upon no good: spit over your right shoulder three times, and say—

Among the myriads of sea and land birds that throng this coast, the raven is king of the rock.[149] The headland and bulwark of the slope of Holacombe is a precipice of perpendicular rock. There, undisturbed (for no bribe would induce a villager to slay them, old or young), the ravens dwell, revel, and reign. One day, as we watched them in their flapping flight, said Uncle Tony to me, “Sometimes, sir, these wild creatures will be so merciful that they will even save a man’s life.” “Indeed! how?” “Why, sir, it came to pass on this wise. There was once a noted old wrecker called Kinsman: he lived in my father’s time; and when no wreck was onward, he would get his wages by raising stone in a quarry by the sea-shore. Well, he was to work one day over yonder, half way down Tower Cliff, and all at once he heard a buzz above him in the air, and he looked up, and there were two old ravens flying round and round very near his head. They kept whirling and whirling and coming so nigh, and they seemed so knowing, that the old man thought verily they were trying to speak, as they made a strange croak; but after some time they went away, and old Kinsman went on with his work. Well, sir, by-and-by they both came back again, flying above and round as before; and then at last, lo and behold! the birds dropped right down into the quarry two pieces of wreck-candle just at the old man’s feet.” (Very often the wreckers pick up Neapolitan wax-candles from vessels in the Mediterranean trade that have been lost in the Channel.) “So when Kinsman saw the candles, he thought in his mind, ‘There is surely wreck coming in upon the beach:’ so he packed his tools together and left them just where he stood, and went his way wrecking. He could find no jetsam, however, though he searched far and wide, and he used to say he verily believed that the ravens must have had the candles at hand in their holt, to be so ready with them as they were. Next day he went back to quarry to his work, and he always used to say it was as true as a proverb: there the tools were all buried deep out of sight, for the craig above had given way and fallen down, and if he had tarried only one hour longer he must have been crushed to death! So you see, sir, what knowledge those ravens must have had; how well they knew the old man, and how fond he was of wreck; how crafty they were to hit upon the only plan that would ever have slocked him away: and the birds, moreover, must have been kind creatures, and willing to save a poor fellow’s life. There is nothing on airth so knowing as a bird is, unless it may be a snake. Did you ever hear, sir, how I heal an adder’s bite? You cut a piece of hazelwood, sir, and you fasten a long bit and a short one together into the form of a cross; then you lay it softly upon the wound, and you say, thrice, blowing out the words aloud like one of the commandiments—

“There, sir,” said uncle Tony, “if David had known that charm he never would have wrote the verse in the Psalms about the adder that was so deaf that she would not hear the voice of the charmer, charm he never so wisely. I never knew that charm fail in all my life!” Tony added, after a pause—“Fail! of course, sometimes a body may fail, but then ’tis always from people’s obstinacy and ignorance. I dare say, sir, you’ve heard the story of Farmer Colly’s mare, how she bled herself to death; and they say he puts the blame on me. But what’s the true case? His man came rapping at my door after I was in bed. I got up and opened the casement and looked out, and I asked what was amiss. ‘O Tony,’ says he, ‘master’s mare is blooding streams, and I be sent over to you to beg you to stop it.’ ‘Very well,’ I said, ‘I can do it just as well here as if I came down and opened the door: only just tell me the name of the beast, and I’ll proceed.’ ‘Name,’ says he, ‘why, there’s no name that I know by; we allus call her the black mare.’ ‘No name?’ says I; ‘then how ever can I charm her? Why, the name’s the principal thing! Fools! never to give her a name to rule the charm by. Be off! be off! I can’t save her.’ So the poor old thing died in course.” “And what may your charm be, Tony?” said I. “Just one verse in Ezekiel, sir, beginning, ‘I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live.’ And so on. I say it only twice, with an outblow between each time. But the finest by-word that I know, sir, is for the prick of a thorn.” And here it follows from my diary in the antique phraseology which Uncle Tony had received from his forefathers through descending generations:—

Another time Uncle Tony said to me, “Sir, there is one thing I want to ask you, if I may be so free, and it is this, Why should a merry-maid” (the local name for mermaid), “that will ride about upon the waters in such terrible storms, and toss from sea to sea in such ruxles as there be upon the coast—why should she never lose her looking-glass and comb?” “Well, I suppose,” said I, “that if there are such creatures, Tony, they must wear their looking-glasses and combs fastened on somehow—like fins to a fish.”[150] “See!” said Tony, chuckling with delight; “what a thing it is to know the Scriptures like your reverence! I never should have found it out. But there’s another point, sir, I should like to know, if you please; I’ve been bothered about it in my mind hundreds of times. Here be I, that have gone up and down Holacombe cliffs and streams fifty years come next Candlemas, and I’ve gone and watched the water by moonlight and sunlight, days and nights, on purpose, in rough weather and smooth (even Sundays, too, saving your presence), and my sight as good as most men’s, and yet I never could come to see a merry-maid in all my life! How’s that, sir?” “Are you sure, Tony,” I rejoined, “that there are such things in existence at all?” “Oh, sir, my old father seen her twice! He was out once by night for wreck (my father watched the coast like most of the old people formerly), and it came to pass that he was down by the duck-pool on the sand at low-water tide, and all at once he heard music in the sea. Well, he croped on behind a rock, like a coastguard-man watching a boat, and got very near the noise. He couldn’t make out the words, but the sound was exactly like Bill Martin’s voice, that singed second counter in church. At last he got very near, and there was the merry-maid very plain to be seen, swimming about upon the waves like a woman bathing—and singing away. But my father said it was very sad and solemn to hear—more like the tune of a funeral hymn than a Christmas carol by far—but it was so sweet that it was as much as he could do to hold back from plunging into the tide after her. And he an old man of sixty-seven, with a wife and a houseful of children at home! The second time was down here by Holacombe Pits. He had been looking out for spars: there was a ship breaking up in the Channel, and he saw some one on the move just at half-tide mark. So he went on very softly, step and step, till he got nigh the place, and there was the merry-maid sitting on a rock, the bootifullest merry-maid that eye could behold, and she was twisting about her long hair, and dressing it just like one of our girls getting ready for her sweetheart on the Sabbath-day. The old man made sure he should greep hold of her before ever she found him out, and he had got so near that a couple of paces more and he would have caught her by the hair as sure as tithe or tax, when, lo and behold! she looked back and glimpsed at him. So in one moment she dived head-foremost off the rock, and then tumbled herself topsy-turvy about in the waters, and cast a look at my poor father, and grinned like a seal!”