4. The ceremony is somewhat this: The party assemble at the Market House, the local aristocracy at 1 p.m. In 1883 there were thirty-one couples of the gentry, this year there were thirty-two couples. The tradesmen’s dance at 4 p.m. was not quite so numerously supported as the upper class one. The volunteer band marches to the gate with three javelin men with lances crowned with flowers. At the appointed time the band strikes up the Celtic Furry tune. The dancers then proceed, two and two, pirouetting and changing partners at certain places. They go into the houses, passing out of the back doors through the gardens, and then re-enter the houses from the back. As they leave the houses in some places they ring the bells. The effect is very singular, but to anyone fond of ancient customs is full of interest as a survival from mediæval times, and such a survival as could hardly have continued except in a remote part of England. Most of the Helston May customs belong to mediæval customs of Merrie England, _e.g._, the boughs outside the houses, the procession dance (though most of our English May dances were held round the May-pole), but the going in and out of the houses and also the music of the Furry tune are distinctively Cornish. W. S. LACH-SZYRMA. PORTS AND CHESTERS. (See _ante_, p. 47.) SIR,--I should not have thought it necessary to notice “A. H.’s” singular effusion in your last number (see p. 47), but for the welcome illustration it affords of what Mr. Allen has so happily termed that “easy off-hand theory,” which “shirks all the real difficulties of the question” (_ante_, v. 286). In trying to pursue his own more searching and scholarly method of dealing with these “interesting philological fossils,” I am only too glad that those who despise this method as “word-twisting,” and prefer to leap at conclusions, should expound, as a contrast, their views. As to “A. H.’s” first point, it is based simply on mis-statements. I never used the word “borrowed” myself. _My_ expression was: “_incorporated_ before the settlement” (_ante_, v. 286). Nor did I ever claim any of these words as “_generically_ an English word,” or as “English forms of some Teutonic roots.” On the contrary, I gave “the Latin words” (v. 285) from which they were each _etymologically_ derived. My contention was that they had become “distinctly English words” by being “Incorporated _before_ the settlement, into the tongue of the English pirates, who brought with them, as part of their language, the forms which they had thus constructed for themselves.”