[Illustration:  ST. KEYNE’S WELL.]

The story was told by the victim to a stranger, and the incident was recorded by Southey in his poem “The Well of St. Keyne”: 

  “You drank of the Well, I warrant, betimes?”
    He to the countryman said: 
  But the countryman smiled as the stranger spake,
    And sheepishly shook his head: 

  “I hastened as soon as the wedding was done,
    And left my wife in the porch;
  But i’ faith! she had been wiser than me,
    For she took a bottle to church.”

It was at Liskeard that we first heard of George Borrow, a tramp like ourselves.  Although we should have been pleased to have had a talk with him, we should scarcely have been able to accompany him on one of his journeys, for he was 6 feet 3 inches in height against our 5 feet 8 inches, and he would have been able to walk quicker than ourselves.  He was born in 1803 and died in 1881, so that he was still alive when we were walking through Cornwall, and was for many years a travelling agent for the British and Foreign Bible Society.  In the course of his wanderings, generally on foot, he made a study of gipsy life, and wrote some charming books about the Romany tribes, his Lavengro and Romany Rye being still widely read.  He was a native of Norfolk, but his father was born near Liskeard, to which place he paid a special visit at the end of 1853.  On Christmas Day in that year, which was also a Sunday, he walked to St. Cleer and attended service in the church, Mr. Berkeley being the preacher, and although there was no organ, he saw a fiddle in the gallery, so fiddles must have then been in use in Cornwall.  He would also see the Well of St. Cleer, which was quite near the church, and must in the time of the Saxons have been covered over with stone, as the old arches and columns were Saxon work.  Borrow’s father was born at Trethinnick Farm, near St. Cleer, which he also went to see.  He left Liskeard in January 1854 on a tramp through Truro and Penzance to Land’s End by almost the same route as that we were about to follow ourselves.  As he made many notes during his wanderings in Cornwall, his friends naturally expected him to publish an account of his travels there, after the manner of a book he had published in 1862 entitled Wild Wales, but they were disappointed, for none appeared.

[Illustration:  ST. CLEER’S WELL.]

It was said that Cornwall did not grow wood enough to make a coffin, and the absence of trees enabled us to see a number of huge, mysterious-looking stones:  some upright and standing alone, others in circles, or in groups named cists composed of upright stones, forming a cavity between them in the shape of a chest covered at the top, and not intended to be opened again, for they had been used as tombs.  Occasionally the stones stood quite near our road, some in the shape of crosses, while we could see others in fields and on the top of small hills.