“It was in 1845,” the Judge began, “just after I had taken my degree, and I had been walking through Cornwall with a knapsack—­no small adventure, I can tell you, in those days.  The inhabitants declined to believe that anyone could walk and carry a pack for the fun of the thing, and I left a trail of suspicion behind me.  The folks were invariably hospitable, though convinced that I was pursuing no good.  You remember, Mr.—­, that when Telemachus visited Gerenia he was generously entertained, and afterwards politely asked if he happened to be a pirate.  My case was pretty similar, only my Cornish hosts did not ask, but took it for granted.

“In the first week of August—­to be precise, on the 4th—­I reached Polreen Cove, and found lodging at the small inn.  The spot and the people so pleased me that I engaged my rooms for a week.  At the week’s end I had decided to stay for a month.  I stayed for almost two months.

“Well, as luck would have it, I had not been in Polreen three nights before there happened the first burglary within the memory of its oldest inhabitant—­if burglary it was.  I incline to think that Mrs. Giddy, the general dealer, had left her shop-door unbolted, and that the culprit, after removing the bell—­the door had two flaps, and the bell, hung on a half-coil of metal, was fitted to a socket inside the lower flap—­had quietly walked in and made his choice.  This choice was a peculiar one—­ six bars of yellow soap, a cullender, some tallow candles, a pair of alpaca boots, a pair of braces, several boxes of matches, an uncertain amount of cheese, a dozen pocket-handkerchiefs, a coloured almanack, three of Mrs. Giddy’s brass weights, and the bell.  He was detected two months later at Bristol, in the act of using one of the handkerchiefs, which illustrated the descent of Moses from Mount Sinai; and four other handkerchiefs were found in his possession, together with Mrs. Giddy’s brass weights.  He had disposed of the rest of the booty, and proved to be a stowaway who had been turned out of a Cardiff schooner on Penzance quay, penniless and starving.  Nothing further was proved against him, and it still puzzles me how he made his way through the length of Cornwall, Devon, and Somerset, on the not very nutritious spoils of Mrs. Giddy’s shop.

“For the moment he got clear away.  Not a soul in Polreen had set eyes on him, and as he entered the village by night so he departed.

“I know now that the excitement in the Cove was intense; that for weeks afterwards the women carried their silver teaspoons and chinaware to bed with them; and I should explain that the housewives of Polreen are inordinately proud of their teaspoons and chinaware—­heirlooms which mark the only degrees of social importance recognised among the inhabitants of that happy Cove.  A family there counts its teaspoons as our old nobility counted its quarterings; a girl is judged to have made a good, bad, or indifferent match by the number of teaspoons she ‘marries into’; and the extreme act of disinheritance is symbolised, not by the testamentary shilling, nor by erasing a name from the Family Bible, but by alienating the family plate-basket.  In short, teaspoons are to the Covers what the salt-cellar was to the ancient Latin races.