There was one parson who did not think this hasty departure quite fair on him, hampered as he was by his clerical robes. One day a piece of paper was handed to him as he read the service, on which was written news of a vessel driving towards the rocks below. The parson finished the prayers, but instead of going to the pulpit walked towards the font. The congregation never stirred; they only thought their minister was about to perform a christening. The sound of the parson’s voice coming from the west end of the church made them turn round, and there they saw him in outdoor attire, his clerical garb laid aside, and not at the font but at the door, his hand upon the handle. ‘My Christian brethren,’ said the reverend gentleman, ‘there’s a ship wrecked upon the rocks below; _this time we’ll all start fair_;’ and so saying, off he ran towards the rocks, his flock, you may believe it, following him pretty closely! You could not get a Cornishman to look on wrecking as a crime. ‘I don’t see, sir,’ said a very pious old parish clerk one day, ‘why there’s no prayers for _foul_ weather; we always prays for _fair_ weather, but the foul makes us richer.’ How can you wonder at such a sentiment when Cornwall, or rather the Scilly Islands, had a good saint, St. Warna, who sent wrecks in time of distress, and to whom the people would pray for a demonstration of her mercy in exceptionally bad seasons! CHAPTER XVII THE SCILLIES The Scillies were the home of at least one religious fraternity in pre-Reformation days; and surely, when we consider the situation of these islands, we may accept it as probable that the inmates of such houses—following the usual rule—displayed some kind of nocturnal light to aid vessels coming from the west or from Ireland. But this is only surmise; the first we hear of a project for erecting a lighthouse on the Scillies is in 1661. The Trinity House then condemned the scheme, but twenty years later itself proposed an exactly similar thing, and obtained from the crown a patent to carry it out and to gather toll for its support. It so happens that at this latter date Sir John Clayton had also suggested a lighthouse in the Scillies, and he naturally wrote a stinging letter to the Trinity Board, taxing them with activity in the good work only when they feared that some one else would undertake it; but with that we need not trouble ourselves. The corporation, as we have said, got the patent and built the lighthouse. Some of the incidents in its building, and in the first few years of its existence, are interesting and characteristic, and illustrative of the life and spirit of Western England.