In the meanwhile we had come to Saint Day, which the Cornish folk call Saint _Dye_, a little market-town situated in midst of mines, living on mines, and sorry or glad only as mining prospers or is depressed. Saucy Cornish girls blew kisses to us from the windows of Saint Day. Sauciness is a quality in which the girls of Cornwall are rich. Alas! our friend drove through the narrow streets all unheeding, like another Jehu. If we had known him longer we would have cursed him for it, but he was a “new chum,” and it could not be done. Discourtesy is always reserved for friends of old standing. And thus we drove into Redruth on a Saturday afternoon. Redruth still remains a busy and populous town, despite the exhausted condition of its neighbouring mining-fields. It is an unlovely town, built at the bottom and sides of a valley, amid the scarred and tumbled mine refuse of a thousand years. The name of Redruth is one that invites attention: it is a name that is more attractive than the town itself. Philological antiquarians profess to find its derivation in the Cornish _Tretrot_, which, being interpreted, means “the house on the bed of the river.” But from such airy surmisings it is better to turn aside to the bed-rocks of modern facts. For it was at Redruth that Murdoch, in 1792, discovered gas as an illuminant; here, too, the same engineer invented the traction-engine some four years later. The country-folk, who met it on the roads at night, thought it was the devil. When our acquaintance drove us to the top of the High Street, we said good-bye, resisting his offers to drive us back to Truro. Amid this Saturday bustle and press of business, we found it somewhat difficult to find accommodation at a decent inn, where anything like quietude reigned. At some places we could have had bedrooms, but no tea; at others, tea, but no rooms. At one inn the servant asked us if we were professionals, eyeing my huge sketch-book. “Professionals”--we glanced at one another. Surely the girl doesn’t take us for photographers? “What professionals did you think we were?” asked the Wreck. “Please, sir, I thought as how you was hactors,” she said. “There’s a lot of ’em come down here to-day to play-act to-night.” Alas! when we told her we were not hactors, we could see her face change, and guessed that a fond illusion had been destroyed. We saw at once that we were inferior beings, and regretted for the first time in our lives that we were not upon the stage. It was perhaps as well they had not sufficient room for us here: we should have felt, so long as we stayed, how shamefully we had deluded that trusting servant girl, and how guilefully personated those bright beings of a higher sphere than ours, whose privilege it is to strike attitudes, and say, “Ah, ha!” at frequent intervals, together with other such colloquial and ordinary expressions. At length we found tea and a rest for the remainder of the day--not before they were necessary. LXIII.