The nation now calling itself British has Saxon, Teutonic, French, and Norse blood in its veins, as well as that of the original stock; but when the successive waves of invaders swept over the country, they usually exhausted themselves before reaching this remote corner, into which the oldest island stock was swept up. This probably accounts for the queer impression one often gets in Cornwall of being abroad. It comes suddenly, rising like one of the Cornish mists and enveloping one, until suddenly the conviction that one is across the sea, far from home, flows almost overwhelmingly over the mind. There is much more likeness and kinship between parts of Cornwall and parts of Brittany than between Cornwall and most of the rest of England. There is no doubt that Cornwall differeth not as "one county from another county," but as one county from all the rest. Here, where the British race had its last stronghold, the stamp of the national characteristics was retained in its effects much longer than elsewhere. Nowadays of course there is intermarrying and travelling, and frequent streams of new blood coming in--half the people you speak to are not Cornish at all--but still there is something remaining which stamps them as a whole. It has often been noticed that there are traces of Spanish blood to be found in the dwellers in the extreme west where many of the great Spanish galleons were wrecked in bygone days; just as there are found brown faces and black hair in the Fair Isle of the Shetlands, where half the population intermarried with some Spaniards of the great Armada wrecked on their coast. In this part of Cornwall one constantly sees women with clear-skinned faces, dark-brown eyes and hair, of a distinctly foreign type. The people, with their rather remote and surface friendliness, have often been described. They will greet you pleasantly and courteously--courteous manners have lingered here--small boys, and men too, still salute a stranger in passing with a greeting, and if one asks the way the answer will be no abrupt direction, but a careful and minute description repeated until clearly understood. Even in Wilkie Collins's time the people were noticeable for their courtesy. He says: "The manners of the Cornish of all ranks, down to the lowest, are remarkably distinguished by courtesy--a courtesy of that kind which is quite independent of artificial breeding, and which proceeds solely from natural motives of kindness and from an innate anxiety to please. Few of the people pass you without a salutation." As it was then so it is now.