two streams join the inlet of the sea, that here
comes to fetch them. The Earls of Cornwall
(dearest Regan was wife to Cornwall) had a
castle here, which stood on a scarped mound
at the left top of Pydar-street. Everywhere
the crow sees paper mills, iron foundries, or
smelting houses, for Truro was one of the old
coinage towns for tin, and in the old coinage hall,
now pulled down, the vice-warden of the
Stannary's held his rugged court, as he now does
in the handsome Italian town hall, whenever
questions occur in Wheal Rose, Wheal Garras,
Ding-Dong, or even the great Botallac.

Truro is the birthplace of that heartless
satirist and utterly unsatisfactory man Foote, of
Polwhele, the Cornish historian, and of Richard
and John Lander, Clapperton's servants,
and the earliest explorers of the river Niger.
Two great missionaries were also natives of
Truro; Henry Martyn, the son of a miner,
who spread Christianity in so many parts of
India and who died of the plague in Persia
in 1812, and Dr. Harreis, the founder of the
London Missionary Society. But the chief lion
of Truro, to the crow's taste, is Perranzabuloe,
the church of St. Pirau in the Sand. St.
Piran, worthy soul, takes us back to those
days when St. Patrick drove out all the
vermin of Ireland except the middlemen and the
agitators, and the Culdees taught Christianity
at Iona. At the end of the fourth century St.
Patrick visited Cornwall to preach against the
Druids, and being successful in discomfiting the
gods of the oak tree and the thunder, returned
to Ireland, consecrated a batch of twelve
bishops, and started them off to complete the
good work. St. Piran, more zealous and eager
than the rest, pushed off, first crossed the
sea on a milestone, landed at St. Ives, walked
eighteen miles to stretch his legs, and then
founded an oratory at Piran among the miners
of St. Agnes, who still consider him their
guardian, and annually fête him on the 5th
of March. The Piran church was built over
the dead body of the miners' saint. The
church, used for the prayer and praise of
two centuries, was submerged by sand before
the Saxons overran Cornwall. The second
church was in all probability then built, and
protected from the devouring sand by a stream
of water which arrested its advance as if by
enchantment. In 1420 (Henry the Fifth) the
church was rebuilt and continued safe till some
miners diverted the stream, and the sand again
pressed on so rapidly that the porch was buried
in a single night. The building was removed in
1803 to a place two miles off. The tradition of
the primeval church was still flickering in men's
memories, when in 1855 the great region of sand
suddenly shifted, disclosed glimpses of stone
work, and at last gave birth to the old oratory,
with its little baptistry. After a quiet doze of ten
centuries the church awoke again, and opened its
eyes, like Rip van Winkle, to find the outer
world somewhat altered. The rude masonry
of granite blocks embedded not in lime, but
china clay, the few windows, the peculiar curve
of the doorway arch, the absence of a font, are
all proofs of Celtic origin and great antiquity.
It was built, says Mr. Haslam, evidently by
persons who had seen Roman work without
understanding it, and seen lime without knowing
how to make it. The altar was taken
down in 1855, and the headless body of
the worthy saint found beneath it. Thirty
years of travellers' visits have done more
to ruin this early relic of Christianity, than
did all the harmless ten centuries of its
interment. The south and east walls have partly
fallen, the sand is again closing over the
victim that once escaped it. In the winter, the
spring of St. Piran, the course being choked
with sand, forms a large pool, and overflows
the persecuted building of the missionary who
first taught the miners to work tin, to the height
of six feet. To the south of this mine a
solitary moorstone cross, pierced with cruciform
holes, marks the site of the second church.
The sand around it is partially fixed with grass,
but it still covers the floor of the ruin to the
depth of nineteen feet. North and south, sand
can be seen blowing over the hills in whirling
clouds. Around both churches the desert soil is
white with human bones, the heaving graves
having from time to time given up their dead.
When the west wind blows on this coast, as Mr.
Redding observes, the sand can be seen
advancing in small waves. All the sand that
destroyed Perranzabuloe was blown in through
a small crevice in the cliff. A few yards of
shore wall built in time would have saved the
whole district. In this paradise of rabbits, the
arundo arenaria, planted to bind the desultory
mass, sometimes a species of convolvulus, and a
starveling mossy vegetation in the hollows, are
the only signs of life.

About a mile and a half from this strange spot,
the crow alights on Perran Round, an equally
interesting place, but with very different associations.
It is the old open-air theatre, where the
Cornish miracle plays used to be performed.
There is an amphitheatre at St. Just with stone
seats, but this is of turf. It is calculated that
the seven rows of benches here held about two
thousand two hundred persons, standing. In the
Bodleian there are still preserved four of these
Cornish religious interludes, the subjects—the
Creation, the Passion, the Resurrection, and the
Ascension. One of these is of the time of James
the First; another is supposed to be as old as
Richard the Third. In the Creation there were
fifty-six characters. The play ends with the
building of Solomon's Temple, the king's
workmen being rewarded by a bishop with Cornish
estates. In the (James the First) Creation, Adam
and Eve appear dressed in white leather. The
serpent had a woman's face, with yellow hair,
and entered a tree and sang. In one scene
the good and evil angels fought with swords,
and in the last act Lamech shoots Cain in
mistake for a wild beast, and devils appear and
carry off the first murderer. The stage
directions require an ark to be built, and a rainbow
to appear. At these plays—which almost
exactly resembled those miracle plays still
performed in the Tyrol, and one of which was