that we opened. Redruth is the mining | there are hollows in some of the stones, centre, a small town in the southwestern which, it is imagined, were used in the sacpart of the county, 261 miles from London. rifices by which the Druids upheld the digIt consists principally of a main street ex- nity and efficacy of their rites. A chapel tending up and down a valley, in a sorry once stood near the summit, and cromlechs and scarred country, where the chimneys have been discovered by excavation. But of many mines spring up. As we looked the chief interest is in the house or castle, out of the window, a drizzling rain was which is poised upon a Titanic group of the sifting through a mist which hung over bowlders, the inequalities of their surface the barren landscape. The earth was not being rectified by the insertion of smaller green or wooded. It had a fallow, ex- stones; and though this foundation seems hausted look, and except where the chim- to be in jeopardy with every gale, it has neys clustered, it was open and wild. supported its burden at least since the When Nature holds treasure beneath the time of Edward the Fourth. The intesurface, she is generally morose in aspect rior has been plastered into shape as a above. A few miles off in the southwest laborer's dwelling, and has nothing in it we could see a lofty and isolated hill, to remind one of the age of its shell. crowned with a bleak and castellated "No hand ever put these stones togethbuilding, which stood on the very apex er," said the laborer's wife, as she served in an attitude of sullen defiance. It seem- us with a cup of tea; "but water dug and ed to have belonged to the scene as long shaped them out," which, all things conas the hill itself, a memorial of unnumber- sidered, is the most reasonable hypothesis. ed and unremembered generations. eminence was Karn Brea, the last hill in England, from which on fair days the sea is visible on three sides of the county. The sides are tangled with gorse and withered ferns, and immense granite bowlders are imbedded in patches of fine close grass. The slope is sufficient to make the ascent moderately difficult. When it is reached, the house on the summit is found to be neither as large nor as ancient as it appears from a distance, but proximity to it increases the interest in its architecture. A mass of bowlders is piled up as if with an unfinished design. The bowlders are of enormous size, and all sorts of shapes, though usually rounded on the edges and at the corners. They weigh many tons, and are probably not less than thirty feet in circumference. As their bed is a soft and grassy earth, and as the usual signs of detrition are not apparent about them, and their disposition indicates some intelligent purpose, the way by which they have been accumulated excites a degree of curiosity which can not be definitely satisfied. Antiquarians associate the hill with the Druids: The There is also on the summit a high pillar of granite erected in 1836 to commem STREET IN LOOE. orate a nobleman, whose deeds, which are not historic, should have been colossal to justify this monument, which painfully intrudes on every view. On all sides of Karn Brea the mines have left their scars, and the excoriated earth has a purple tinge. But there is little movement, little smoke from the high chimneys, and the scaffolding over the disused shafts is like the skeleton of the departed industry. Picking our way through the purplish mud and stones below the Karn, we discovered a little old woman laboring over a pile of unmilled copper ore. We had to look twice before we could assure ourselves of her sex: not only was her dress perplexing, but there was an unreality and weirdness in her person. She was very small, almost dwarfish, with bent shoulders and wrinkled hands and face; her skin had the texture of parchment, and was curiously mottled with blue; her Shov hair was thin and wiry. She seemed very old, but her eyes had a shrewd and penetrating quickness, and her movements were utterly without decrepitude. Indeed, she applied herself to her work with the willing vigor of a strong young man, and the work consisted of shovelling the heavy blocks of ore into a small wagon resting on a temporary tramway. elful after shovelful was thrown in with an easy muscular swing, and with much more activity than the average "navvy" ever exhibits. Her petticoats ended above the ankle, and were stained with the hue of the copper ore; her shapeless legs were muffled up in woollen wraps, and her feet incased in substantial brogans. She was not apparently uncomfortable bodily, but her face had in it a look of uncomplaining suffering, of unalterable gravity, of a habituated sorrow which had extinguished all possibility of a smile. Not understanding a question which we put to her, she used the words, "Please, sir?"-a form of | I'm not young any longer, that's sure," she interrogation which we often heard in the neighborhood of Redruth. "You seem to be old for such hard work," we repeat"Deed, sir, I don't know how old I am, but I've been at it this forty years. ed. answered, in a clear voice with scarcely any accent. "Are you married?" "No, sir; nobody would ever have me," she continued, without relaxing from her gravity or delaying her work for a moment-"no She had nearly filled the wagon by this time, and two younger women, dressed as she was, but more vigorous-looking, came to help her, and after spitting on their hands, which were as large and as hard as any man's, they applied themselves with shovels to the heap of ore, falling into a machine-like swing of the body as they scooped up the heavy rock. Two men afterward joined them, and when the wagon was loaded, they propelled it along the track toward the mill, the women sharing the work equally with the men, if, indeed, they did not use even greater exertions. body would have me or go with me, as I was always subject to fits-terrible they are. I still have 'em once or twice a week sometimes, always with a change in the moon." "How do you account for it?" "Why, before my twenty-fourth year I was in the service of a lady, who threw me down stairs, and that changed my blood; so, when the moon changes, I have the fits. Little can be done for them when the blood's changed." This superstition was a matter of profound faith with her, but otherwise her manner was remarkably intelligent. She told us that her wages were fourteenpence-twentyeight cents a day; and when we unnecessarily said that she must be tired of work at such a price, she answered, in a bitter tone, "No use being tired; when you are tired, there's the work-house for you." The employment of women underground is now forbidden by law, the deg radation resulting from it having been perceived by English legislators only when it had become flagitious; but of when they observed him. Though his manner is characterized by a dignified reserve discouraging to familiarity, one of these young persons saucily said to her neighbor, "He's going to put you into a panorama!" Except the old woman whose blood had been changed, we did not meet with any one who entertained any sort of superstition, and who did not more or less frustrate us in our search for the unleavened and old-fashioned simplicity of character which we expected to find in Cornwall. Those to whom we spoke took as an offense to their intelligence our insidiously thirteen thousand persons engaged in the mines, about two thousand are women, who are employed in various parts of the process of dressing the ore. In the simpler operations very young girls are useful, and at the mill we found a large number of them-the daughters of miners usually-some of them pretty, and all of them neatly clothed and intelligent, even pert in manner. They can all write, and they have an appetite for literature of the Adolphus-Adelina sort, which they devour in penny installments when their work is slack. There was a time within the memory of men not yet old when an English peasant, spoken to by a well-framed questions which were designed to dressed stranger, was completely overcome, and his abashment took the form of paralysis. But the spirit of the age is not favorable to the cultivation of diffidence or reverence; the travelling stranger is no longer a hero, and no longer embarrassed by gaping attentions. Even a learned antiquarian, in alluding to the epochs of Karn Brea, which near the summit is a rabbit-warren, and therefore an attractive place to poachers, did not think a little jocularity ill-timed in the consideration of so serious a subject. It is most interesting, he said to his audience, which was THE GUILDHALL, LOOE. quite unexpectant of any approaching | betray them into a confession of faith in levity, to contemplate the successive periods through which Cornwall has passed from the early times when there were native burying-places to the cromlech period, the cromlechs seeming to have belonged to different races passing to the south; after the cromlech period the Karn shows evidences of the Roman period; then of the early Middle Ages, and of the late Middle Ages. He once found articles of the Roman-British time, and, finally, said this playful savant, he fount a ferret bell. The artist who shared our umbrella in Cornwall used his sketch-book while we were watching the young women in the mill, and they were not at all disconcerted witchcraft. The sufferer from "fits" in the olden time either went into the churchyard at midnight, and cut from one of the spouts three bits of lead, each about the size of a farthing, or, if it was a young woman, she sat in the church porch after service, and as the young men passed, each of them dropped a penny into her lap, until the thirtieth came; he took up the pence, and substituted half a crown for them, and with this coin in her hand she walked three times round the communion table (when she could get the opportunity, which was a matter of some difficulty, as the minister was not friendly to this sort of thing), and afterward had the half-crown made into a ring, which |