After leaving Truro, an ancient town with a recently established cathedral, the road to Penzance, though excellent, is without special interest. It passes through the copper-mining section of Cornwall and the country is dotted with abandoned mines. A few are still operated, but it has come to the point where, as a certain Englishman has said, "Cornwall must go to Nevada for her copper," and there are more Cornish miners in the western states than there are in their native shire. Penzance is another of the South of England resort towns and is beautifully situated on Mounts Bay. One indeed wonders at the great number of seacoast resorts in Britain, but we must remember that there are forty millions of people in the Kingdom who need breathing places as well as a number of Americans who come to these resorts. The hotels at these places are generally excellent from the English point of view, which differs somewhat from the American. Probably there is no one point on which the difference is greater than the precise temperature that constitutes personal comfort and makes a fire in the room necessary. On a chilly, muggy day when an American shivers and calls for a fire in the generally diminutive grate in his room, the native enjoys himself or even complains of the heat, and is astonished at his thin-skinned cousin, who must have his room--according to the British notion--heated to suffocation. The hotel manager always makes a very adequate charge for fires in guest-rooms and is generally chary about warming the corridors or public parts of the hotel. In one of the large London hotels which actually boasts of steam heat in the hallways, we were amazed on a chilly May day to find the pipes warm and a fine fire blazing in the great fireplace in the lobby. The chambermaid explained the astonishing phenomenon: the week before several Americans had complained frequently of the frigid atmosphere of the place without exciting much sympathy from the management, but after they had left the hotel, it was taken as an evidence of good faith and the heat was turned on. But this digression has taken me so far away from Penzance that I may as well close this chapter with it. VII FROM CORNWALL TO SOUTH WALES