22 CORNWALL then we catch fleeting glimpses of scenes standing out bright and clear amid a general fog, just as we can to-day catch the vivid pictures of the land- scape before the grey mists sweep down with incredible speed and blot them out. We see Athelstan's terrible fight with the Britons ; his establishment of the collegiate church at St. Buryan in pursuance of his vow, when he returned vic- torious from the Scilly Isles. We get brilliant peeps in the legends of King Arthur ; in the mysterious beehive huts and stone circles of a people who have vanished ; in the whimsical tales of the early saints who scattered themselves so freely over the land on their arrival from Ireland ; and we find hieroglyphic messages we cannot read in structures we call cromlechs and in the cliff- castles. Small wonder that Cornwall is a land of legend and story, and that tales of fabulous men and wonder-working men abound. In our very earliest nursery days, long before we could point to Cornwall on the map, we learned to repeat : "Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum, I smell the blood of a Cornishman. Let him be alive or let him be dead, Til grind his bones to make me bread."
