Untitled

THE CELTIC MAGAZINE. 21
wanders from the old hearth, whose children's children have been strangers
for countless generations, still to speak to us, through these old Cornish
legends and our Gaelic Bibles, of all that concerns the family life, in a
voice tha.t is all unchanged. For if the Cornish father is a little disguised
as tat and the mother as warn, yet what help of Grimm's laws does any
of us need to hear a brother's tongue in such words as teilu family, brand
brother, fhuir sister, mob son, car friend, and altruan foster-mother? Or
does the voice turn strange, or suggest a feeling anywise foreign to our
accustomed ideas, when it speaks of the head of the family as pen-teilu,
and of the mother as mam-teilu ? Similarly old Dlly Pendraeth, with
whom died, a hundred years ago, the living Cornish tongue, would tell us
Gaels how near we both keep to the old forms of speech which her
ancestors and ours learned from the same father, when she called her head
pen, her nose trein or iron, her chest cluit, her skin croin, her shoulderblade
scuid, her elbow elin, and her hand lau. Indeed, I think, I can
even now form to myself a good picture of the worthy old crone, as
chattering strange words which none around her understood, and with the
nail (euuin) at the end of her long weird forefinger she touched and
mournfully counted each staring rib (asen) in the side of her old nag
(marc), which had come to such sad plight through lack of fat or blonec !
What says the Cornish language as to the social condition of the
or hunter
primitive patriarchal Celt ? That he was a helh-fhur (sealgair)
goes without saying. But, it is to be expected, his game was in large
measure different from that of Ossian's heroes. The goat and the horse
were known to him, for it is only from him that Gael and Kerne alike
could learn to call these animals gaur and mare. He must have known
something of agriculture, else how could these his descendants, more entirely
sundered than are to-day the Antipodeans, agree to arm their plough with
a soc ? And there are other reasons for placing him in an age long posterior
to that of stone for ; though the Cornish gof seems to have been a Jackof-all-trades,
working indifferently in metal and wood, and sometimes even
in clay, yet was there a Cornish eure, or gold-worker, and an heirnior, or
iron-worker. When this iron-worker handled his furnace or his red hot
metal clumsily, the result was a lose or burn, whose pain he eased with an
urat. He
ointment, called by him, as we still call it in the Highlands,
had haloin, or salt, to his steak of goat's flesh ; when age, sickness, or
folly brought him to poverty he was bochodoc ; when good he was, not
ma, but da ; when a quarreller he was a strifor ; when a sinner he was
drocli-oberor or drocger ; and when fairly mad he had sack diaul. If a
spark from the anvil deprived him of sight, like his brother Gael, this
Cornish craftsman was dall ; if deaf he was bothar ; if dumb, qf-lauar ;
squinting, he was cam ; and aweary, guan or ainaich. Rest and refreshment
brought nerth, or strength, to his arm when he ;
spoke truth it was
guirion ; and when, as skilful mechanics sometimes will, he blew, not his
bellows, but the horn of his own praise, his pride was goth. And finally,
though even he could never dream of the crown, or curun-ruy, and scarce
dared aspire to be a
pen-can(t)-gur,
or head of a hundred men, yet may it
be suggested, as a curious question in philology, whether he did not sit
among his fellows crowned with the first rude model of that universal
symbol of modern Saxon respectability, which, whenever he got it, he
wore and called a hot !