of its
success, not limited to Cornwall. Even a parson like Hawker, beloved
by all his parishioners as he was, could not win them from Dissent.
There is a chance that the priests of Rome will step in and win where
the parish clergyman has partly failed. More than twenty years since,
Richard Jefferies wrote about the tonsured priest becoming a power in
English country lanes. Here in the West Country hundreds of rich acres
are held by the monastic orders. The country parson has now to fight
against his old opponent, the Methodist or Baptist, and his older
opponent, the priest of Rome. But the winds that sweep across the
meadows and sand-dunes, the waves that lap peacefully or dash
thunderously, tell us nothing of these old and often dismal quarrels.
They are but secular things after all; the things that are eternal
reach deeper than creed or vestment. We do not ask what fetish or
totem the sleepers in the grassy barrows believed in; we may ask if
they lived their lives truly and faithfully, doing that which was
good according to the light of their primitive consciences.

Between the two headlands of Penhale Point and Kelsey Head lies
Holywell Bay, the larger portion of which is in the parish of Cubert.
It is a wild region of blown sand. The two headlands are grandly
lashed by breaking waves in rough weather, while the interlying beach
is swept with great rolling breakers. A little inland are many traces
of discontinued mining; and though their suggestions are dismal
enough, these are probably more picturesque in their neglect and decay
than they could be if in full operation. The bay and the sands are
named after the holy well of St. Cubert, formerly one of the most
famous of Cornwall's numerous wells. St. Cubert, the titular patron of
the parish and well, has been mistaken for St. Cuthbert; but it is
obvious to any one who has devoted any study to Cornish saint-lore
that the Northumbrian saint has no business here, good man though he
was. He has been intruded to displace some earlier and less widely
known possessor. Cuthbert was certainly never in Cornwall, and the
older Cornish dedications are almost invariably the actual footprints
of Celtic missionaries. It is probable that the true Cubert was St.
Cybi, or Cuby, whom we find at Cuby near Grampound, and whose name
also survives in the Caergybi and Llangybi of Wales. There is another
well of St. Cuby at Duloe, north of Looe; and he was related to some
of Cornwall's mos