World's last wave?"

"Beside it in the mound
A charmed bead of flint was found.
Some woman surely in this place
Covered with flowers a little baby-face,
And laid the cowrie on the cold dead breast;
And, weeping, turned for comfort to the landless West?"

"No man shall ever know.
It happened all so long ago
That this same childless woman may
Have stood upon the cliffs around the bay
And watched for tin-ships that no longer came,
Nor knew that Carthage had gone down in Roman flame."

This cowrie--are we even certain that it was Indian?--that it differed so
unmistakably from the cowries discoverable by twos and threes at times on
a little beach off which I cast anchor half a dozen times every summer?
I speak as a man anxious to get at a little plain knowledge concerning the
land of his birth, and the researchers seem honestly unable to give me any
that does not tumble to pieces even in their own hands. For--and this
seems the one advance made--the researchers themselves are honest
nowadays. Their results may be disappointing, but at least they no longer
bemuse themselves and us with the fanciful and even mystical speculations
their predecessors indulged in. Take the case of our inscribed stones and
wayside crosses. Cornwall is peculiarly rich in these: of crosses alone
it possesses more than three hundred. But when we make inquiry into their
age we find ourselves in almost complete fog. The merit of the modern
inquirer (of Mr. Langdon, for instance) is that he acknowledges the fog,
and does not pretend to guide us out of it by haphazard hypotheses
propounded with pontifical gravity and assurance--which was the way of
that erratic genius, the Rev. R. S. Hawker:--

"Wheel-tracks in old Cornwall there were none, but there were strange
and narrow paths across the moorlands, which, the forefathers said, in
their simplicity, were first traced by Angels' feet. These, in truth,
were trodden and worn by religious men: by the Pilgrim as he paced his
way towards his chosen and votive bourne; or by the Palmer, whose
listless footsteps had neither a fixed Kebla nor future abode.
Dimly visible, by the darker hue of the crushed grass, these strait
and narrow roads led the traveller along from one Hermitage to another
Chapelry, or distant and inhabited cave; or the byeways turned aside
to