is neighbours for the
lack of it. But when the discovery comes, he will be lucky if the
remembrance of it do not wake him up of nights, and keep him writhing in
his bed--that is, if we suppose _him_ to have a sense of humour too.

An aeronaut who had lost his bearings, descending upon some farm labourers
in Suffolk, demanded anxiously where he was. "Why, don't you know?
You be up in a balloon, bo." A pedestrian in Cornwall stopped a labourer
returning from work, and asked the way to St.--'. "And where might
you come from?" the labourer demanded. "I don't see what affair that is
of yours. I asked you the way to St. '--'." "Well then, if you don't
tell us where you be come from, we bain't goin' to tell you the way to
St. '--'" It seems to me that both of these replies contain humour, and
the second a deal of practical wisdom.

The foregoing remarks apply, with very little modification, to those
strangers who take up their residence in Cornwall and, having sojourned
among us for a while without ever penetrating to the confidence of the
people, pass judgment on matters of which, because they were above
learning, knowledge has been denied to them. A clergyman, dwelling in a
country parish where perhaps he finds himself the one man of education
(as he understands it), is prone enough to make the mistake; yet not more
fatally prone than your Gigadibs, the literary man, who sees his
unliterary (even illiterate) neighbours not as they are, but as a clever
novelist would present them to amuse an upper or middle class reader.
Stevenson (a greater man than Gigadibs) frankly confessed that he could
make nothing of us:--

"There were no emigrants direct from Europe--save one German family
and a knot of Cornish miners who kept grimly by themselves, one
reading the New Testament all day long through steel spectacles, the
rest discussing privately the secrets of their old-world mysterious
race. Lady Hester Stanhope believed she could make something great
of the Cornish: for my part, I can make nothing of them at all.
A division of races, older and more original than that of Babel,
keeps this close esoteric family apart from neighbouring Englishmen.
Not even a Red Indian seems more foreign in my eyes. This is one of
the lessons of travel--that some of the strangest races dwell next
door to you at home."

This straightforward admission is worth (to my mind) any half-dozen