Camborne streets straggle almost as far as Dolcoath, and doubtless many of them are built over some of the galleries and levels of that immense mine. Camborne is an offence to the eye. It is much larger than either Truro, Redruth, or Penzance, numbering 15,000 inhabitants, most of whom live upon mines, either directly or indirectly. Indeed, many of them live in the mines, and merely come home to sleep. Thus it is that all day long Camborne seems almost a city of the dead. It is a town whose houses, if not squalid, are the most abjectly characterless of any I have ever seen, stony granite affairs, which wear the look of having once upon a time been inhabited--but a very long while ago, and meanwhile having been preserved from decay by some mystic preservative power. LXV. The finest thing in Camborne is the road that leads out of it. That is a clumsy paraphrase of Johnson, I know, touched, too, with a suspicion of Irishry; but for all that, true enough. I don’t know that the little hamlet of Barrepper would, with an advent from more pleasing scenes, have seemed so welcome a place, but after Camborne it was welcome indeed. A little hamlet, Barrepper, on the highroad to Hayle. It consists, apparently, of half a dozen cottages, every one uninhabited and in ruins, and one general shop, which is also the post-office. One wonders whence come the people to buy and post. No one was there when we passed by, save the shopkeeper postmaster, and he sat outside his shop, reading a newspaper in the road. Close by a brooklet trickled across the highway, under a rude stone bridge, and this was all of Barrepper. Now the country side became flat and singularly uninteresting; utterly undistinguished. The mining-field was left behind, and the streams ran clear again, but the level lands and the smug hamlet of Carnhell Green, through which we passed, were featureless. The straggling stony village of Gwinear, too, is remarkable for nothing but its name--a name, like those of many Cornish villages, full of possibilities. The Cornish have a wonderful Procrustean trick of altering proper names to suit the conveniences of their speech, only the trick works commonly but one way with them, and that is with the lopping off, rather than the addition or elongation of, syllables. For example, the villages and churches of Phillack and Filleigh are named after the martyr saint Felicitas; and what was once a baptismal name for girls, Felicity, very often met with in the county, is at this day not only colloquially but baptismally given as Filly or Philly.[13] To see these names (as one frequently does) on tombstones of quiet sober graveyards, strikes the stranger with an effect of misapplied humour, but a Cornishman sees no levity in them. But, in Cornwall generally, girls’ names are strangely contorted, as witness the very favourite appellations of Jenifer for Guinevere, and Tamsin for Thomasine. These we saw often, and once that rare and pretty name, Avice.