udience requested me (through their chairman) to print my lecture.
This I undertook also; but being very young in literary enterprises, I
added a great deal of other matter to the manuscript which I was
preparing for the press. There was much in the book * about early
Christianity and ecclesiastical antiquities. I imagined that this parish
was, in British and Druidic times, a populous place, and somewhat
important. There was a "Round," or amphitheatre, for public games, and
four British castles; also a great many sepulchral mounds on the hills,
the burial-place of chieftains. I supposed that St. Piran came here
among these rude natives (perhaps painted savages) to preach the Gospel,
and then built himself a cell by the sea-shore,+ near a spring or well,
where he baptized his converts. Close by, he built this little church,
in which he worshipped God and prayed for the people.

________________________________

* "The Church of St. Piran." Published by Van Voorst.
+ This little building still remains entire, under the sand. Some pieces
of British pottery and limpet-shells were found outside the door.
________________________________

The words of the poet Spenser do not inaptly describe this scene of
other days:--

A little, lowly hermitage it was,
Downe in a dale--
Far from resort of people, that did pas
In treveill to and fro: a litle wyde
There was a holy chappell edifyde,
Wherein the hermite dewly wont to say
His holy things each morn and eventyde;
Thereby a crystall streame did gently play,
Which, from a sacred fountaine welled forth away.

Here then, more than fourteen centuries ago, people called upon God; and
when their little sanctuary was overwhelmed with the sand, they removed
to the other side of the river, and built themselves another church; but
they still continued to bury their dead around and above the oratory and
resting-place of St. Piran.

When my book was published, there ensued a hot controversy about the
subject of it; and some who came to see the "Lost Church" for
themselves, declared that it was nothing more than "a modern cowshed;"
others would not believe in the antiquity I claimed for it: one of these
even ventured to assert his opinion in print, that "it was at least
eight centuries later than the date I had fixed;" another asked in a
newspaper letter, "How is it, if this is a church, that there are no
others of the same period on record?"

This roused me to make further research;