Other sitting-rooms were similarly adorned, with the addition of a picture of John Wesley as a child escaping from the window of a burning house, with many anxious men holding up their hands from below. The smell of flowers and of sun-warmed furniture and old upholstery mingles in such rooms. But the kitchens are often as charming as in Wales. I remember one especially near Carn Galver. The farmhouse was of whitened stone under a steep thatch. In front were fuchsia trees in the corner of a stony yard; to one side, the haystacks and piles of furze and bracken and peat. The farmer’s wife was carrying peat on an iron hook into the kitchen and I followed her. A pan of yellow scalded cream stood inside. The fireplace was a little room in itself, with seats at each side and a little fire of wood and three upright turves in one corner of the great stone hearth: over the fire the kettle boiled. Horse ornaments of polished brass surmounted the fireplace. The wallpaper had given up its pattern long since to a smoky uneven gold; nailed to it were calendars and lists of fairs and sales; against it were two small tables, one to support a Bible and an almanac, the other spread with a white cloth on which was a plate and a bowl of cream. Behind the door and between it and the fire was a high-backed settle of dark wood, with elbow-rests. The floor was flagged and sanded. The light came in through a little square window on to the Bible by the opposite wall, and through the open door on to the figure of the housewife, a woman of forty. A delicate white face shone beneath a broad untrimmed straw hat that was tied tightly under her chin so as to hide her ears and most of her black hair. Her black skirt was kilted up behind; a white apron contrasted with black shoes, black stockings and black clothes. At first her face was hardly seen, not only because but a part of it emerged from the shell of her hat, but because the spirit that emanated from it was more than the colour and features and so much in harmony with the sea and crag and moor and dolmen of her land. It is evading an insuperable difficulty to say that this spirit was not so much human as fay. It was the spirit of which her milky complexion, the bright black eyes, white teeth and fine red lips of her readily smiling and naïvely watching fearless face, her slender form, her light and rapid movements upon small feet, were only the more obvious expressions. Her spirit danced before her--not quite visibly, not quite audibly--as she moved or spoke or merely smiled; if it could have been seen it would have been a little singing white flame changing to blue and crimson in its perpetual flickering. It was a spirit of laughter, of laughter unquenchable since the beginning of time, of laughter in spite of and because of all things, the laughter of life like a jewel in desolate places. It was a spirit most ancient and yet childlike, birdlike: it belonged to a world outside any which other human beings