From Gretna Green to Land's End: A Literary Journey in England.Bates, Katharine Lee
General
From Gretna Green to Land's End: A Literary Journey in England.
Bates, Katharine Lee
England -- Description and travel
These held the close attention of a Cornish miner who, after forty
years of fortune-seeking in Australia, was coming home to Camelford
for a visit. He drove up with us in the rattling wagonette, gazing on
ragged hedge and prickly furze as a thirsty soul might gaze on
Paradise. The fulness of his heart overflowed in little laughters,
though the tears were glistening on his lashes, and in broken words of
memory and joy. He kept pointing out to us, mere strangers that we
were, not noting and not caring what we were, the stiles and streams
and rocks associated with special events of his boyhood and youth.
As we went clattering down into the little stone huddle of houses, we
had to turn away from the rapture in his eyes. Brothers and sisters
were waiting to greet him, with tall children of theirs that had been
to him but names, yet the human welcome could hardly penetrate through
his dream, through his ecstatic communion with the scene itself. As we
were driving out of Camelford early the next morning, we caught sight
of our grizzled Cornishman once again, standing in one of those humble
doorways with the shining still upon his face.
A man like that would make anybody homesick and, to speak impartially,
we thought that Camelford was far less worthy of such emotion than two
villages we severally remembered over sea. We fell out of humour with
the poor old town, would not hear of it as the Arthurian Camelot,
"a city of shadowy palaces
And stately,"
and disdained the tradition that the blameless king fell at Slaughter
Bridge. My athletic comrade, however, to the admiration of a flock of
little schoolgirls, swung herself down the riverbank to see his
tombstone and reported it as reading:
_Caten hic jacit filius Marconi._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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