“And yet,” continued the vicar, “they do not leave me alone. I believe they come down the chimney to get at me.” “Well, well, now, parson!” exclaimed the mother, holding up her hands; “to think how forward of them!” “Of whom?” “Why, the Miss Kitties, sure. When I were young, maidens would have blushed to do such a thing. And come down the chimbley too!” After a pause, mother’s pride overmastering sense of what befitted her sex: “But Ezekiel must be rare handsome, for the maidens to be after him so. And, I reckon, the Miss Kitties is quality-folk too.” Mr. Hawker thus describes the Wellcombe people: “They have amongst them no farrier for their cattle, no medical man for themselves, no beer-house, no shop; a man who travels for a distant town (Stratton) supplies them with sugar by the ounce, or tea in smaller quantities still. Not a newspaper is taken in throughout the hamlet, although they are occasionally astonished and delighted by the arrival, from some almost forgotten friend in Canada, of an ancient copy of _The Toronto Gazette_. This publication they pore over to weariness; and on Sunday they will worry the clergyman with questions about transatlantic places and names, of which he is obliged to confess himself utterly ignorant. An ancient dame once exhibited her prayer-book, very nearly worn out, printed in the reign of George II., and very much thumbed at the page from which she assiduously prayed for the welfare of Prince Frederick.” The people of Wellcombe were very ignorant. Indeed, a good deal of ignorance lingered late in the West of England. The schoolmaster had not thrown a great blaze of light on the Cornish mind in the first half of the present century. I give a specimen of English composition by a schoolmaster of the old style in Devonshire; and it may be guessed that the Cornish fared not better for teachers than their Wessex neighbours. This is an advertisement, said to have been written over a little shop:—