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National Geographic : 1915 Jul
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CHANNEL PORTS-AND SOME OTHERS could talk long and lovingly of St. Ives, which has the loveliest bay in Cornwall. Here is no narrow chasm, where houses squeeze and crowd like swallows' nests and great rocks bar the way. St. Ives sits by a smooth circle of sea into which a tongue of rocky land thrusts a bold curving headland, inclosing an inner harbor in the great sweep of the bay. Here by the sea dwells the "real" St. Ives, close-pressed, low-crouched, stone built to withstand the worst storms of sea and time. Up the green hillside climb the summer homes, the villas and cottages and hotels, that belong to the transient St. Ives. As its mean winter temperature is but 4 de grees lower than that of Rome, it has a fair percentage of winter visitors, while in summer its hotels are crowded. St. Ives does not let its visitors interfere with its business, which is pilchard fish ing-a picturesque thing to the idle on looker, but heavy-smelling work for the fishermen-and renting studios. It has been said that of the 200 or more canvases dispatched each year from Cornwall to London "seven-eighths have been painted at Newlyn or St. Ives." Certainly, in the tangled streets of the little town, wherever a window gives upon the sea be sure an easel stands. St. Ives gets its name from an Irish princess, St. Ia, who floated thither upon a leaf and landed on Pendinas, the rocky headland which St. Ives calls "the island." "Are there many saints in Cornwall?" I once asked a Cornish friend. "Don't you know the old saying?" he replied. "There are more saints in Cornwall than in heaven." I'm not prepared to dispute it, and certainly the Cornish saints have arresting names and habits. "A LADY SAINT INDEED" My St. Ia has been hotly contended, I must admit. "A lady saint indeed !" cried the artist scornfully. "Just go to Brit tany and learn what extraordinary things St. Ives did there! Things no lady saint would have done !" Just as if only mas culine saints did extraordinary things! It was in 450 that St. Ia drifted in on her leaf and suffered martyrdom. The Irish saints had delightful means of tray- eling. St. Piran came on a millstone. Any one who has seen a Welsh coracle will understand. In Cornish the place is called Porth Ia, and the square-towered church there by Porthminster sands com memorates the name. In its tiny yard is a beautiful old cross dug up a century ago from the place where it had lain for how many hundred years? We like to think it St. Ia's own, but there are those that say it is later, and others who main tain it is older far than she. The stone of it, like that of many another Cornish cross, was probably part of a menhir, those curious druidical monuments fre quent in Cornwall and Brittany. At St. Ives we touch "modern con veniences" once more, and by changing trains twice may reach Polperro's nearest coast neighbor, the two Looes; for they are two, on either side of a trickling "littel broke that cometh down out of the hilles" to the sea, with a quaint old leg end-bearing bridge to bind them, like many other Cornish ports. The houses are in all shades that "whitewash" yields-blue, pink, lavender, corn, or silvery gray-framed in their honeysuckle, roses, and rich trees, climb ing the hills upon both sides of the way. Upon the river's east bank there is a level stretch permitting a roadway, but the west bank leaps straight up from the water edge. LOOE'S BRAVE HISTORY The towns are not very ancient, but be fore the days of Elizabeth they had sent many boats to the wars with France and Spain. Details of these are hazy in Looe minds, but one thing holds fast-one boat sailing from the port must be a George, in memory of a George which took three Spanish galleys single-handed in an "in ternational unpleasantness" hundreds of years ago. There is the island off the western cliff, scene of many adventures in those gay, swaggering days gone beyond recall. De licious is that one where the fast-sailing smugglers derisively offer the revenue cutter a tow-line. Looe depends upon her summer guests and her fishing-boats, of which about 50 go to the fisheries off the Irish coast. Those fishing-boats,
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