Ducite ab urbe domum, mea, carmina, ducite Daphnin_.


I knew the superstition lingered along the country-side: and I was
sworn to find it. But the labourers and their wives smoothed all
intelligence out of their faces as soon as I began to hint at it. Such
is the way of them. They were my good friends, but had no mind to help
me in this. Nobody who has not lived long with them can divine the
number of small incommunicable mysteries and racial secrets chambered
in their inner hearts and guarded by their hospitable faces. These
alone the Celt withholds from the Saxon, and when he dies they are
buried with him.

A chance word or two of my old nurse, by chance caught in some cranny
of a child's memory and recovered after many days, told me that the
charm was still practised by the woman-folk, or had been practised not
long before her death. So I began to hunt for it, and, almost as soon,
to believe the search hopeless. The new generation of girls, with
their smart frocks, in fashion not more than six months behind London,
their Board School notions, and their consuming ambition to "look
like a lady"--were these likely to cherish a local custom as rude and
primitive as the long-stone circles on the tors above? But they were
Cornish; and of that race it is unwise to judge rashly. For years I
had never a clue: and then, by Sheba Farm, in a forsaken angle of the
coast, surprised the secret.

Sheba Farm stands high above Ruan sands, over which its windows flame
at sunset. And I sat in the farm kitchen drinking cider and eating
potato-cake, while the farmer's wife, Mrs. Bolverson, obligingly
attended to my coat, which had just been soaked by a thunder-shower.