oms were sprinkled with sea-sand, and
there was not a single silver fork.

"At that time, when our colonial possessions were very limited, our army
and navy on a small scale, and there was comparatively little demand for
intellect, the younger sons of gentlemen were often of necessity brought
up to some trade or mechanical art, to which no discredit, or loss of
caste, as it were, was attached. The eldest son, if not allowed to
remain an idle country squire, was sent to Oxford or Cambridge,
preparatory to his engaging in one of the three liberal professions of
divinity, law, or physic; the second son was perhaps apprenticed to a
surgeon or apothecary, or a solicitor; the third to a pewterer or
watchmaker; the fourth to a packer or mercer, and so on, were there more
to be provided for.

"After their apprenticeships were finished, the young men almost
invariably went to London to perfect themselves in their respective trade
or art: and on their return into the country, when settled in business,
they were not excluded from what would now be considered genteel society.
Visiting then was conducted differently from what it is at present.
Dinner-parties were almost unknown, excepting at the annual feast-time.
Christmas, too, was then a season of peculiar indulgence and
conviviality, and a round of entertainments was given, consisting of tea
and supper. Excepting at these two periods, visiting was almost entirely
confined to tea-parties, which assembled at three o'clock, broke up at
nine, and the amusement of the evening was commonly some round game at
cards, as Pope Joan, or Commerce. The lower class was then extremely
ignorant, and all classes were very superstitious; even the belief in
witches maintained its ground, and there was an almost unbounded
credulity respecting the supernatural and monstrous. There was scarcely
a parish in the Mount's Bay that was without a haunted house, or a spot
to which some story of supernatural horror was not attached. Even when I
was a boy, I remember a house in the best street of Penzance which was
uninhabited because it was believed to be haunted, and which young people
walked by at night at a quickened pace, and with a beating heart. Amongst
the middle and higher classes there was little taste for literature, and
still less for science, and their pursuits were rarely of a dignified or
intellectual kind. Hunting, shooting, wrestling, cock-fighting,
generally ending in drunkenness, we