From Plymouth to Penzance through Truro runs the finest road in
Cornwall, broad, well kept and with few steep grades. It passes through
a beautiful section and is bordered in many places by the immense parks
of country estates. In some of these the woods were seemingly left in
their natural wild state, though close inspection showed how carefully
this appearance was maintained by judicious landscape gardening. In many
of the parks, the rhododendrons were in full bloom, and their rich
masses of color wonderfully enlivened the scenery. Everything was fresh
and bright. It had been raining heavily the night before and the air was
free from the dust that had previously annoyed us. It would be hard to
imagine anything more inspiring than the vistas which opened to us as we
sped along. The road usually followed the hills in gentle curves, but
at places it rose to splendid points of vantage from which to view the
delightful valleys. Then again it lost itself under great over-arching
trees, and as we came too rapidly down a steep hill on entering Bodmin,
the road was so heavily shaded that we were near our undoing. The loose
sand had been piled up by the rain and the dense shade prevented the
road from drying. The car took a frightful skid and by a mere hair's
breadth escaped disastrous collision with a stone wall--but we learned
something.
After leaving Truro, an ancient town with a recently established
cathedral, the road to Penzance, though excellent, is without special
interest. It passes through the copper-mining section of Cornwall and
the country is dotted with abandoned mines. A few are still operated,
but it has come to the point where, as a certain Englishman has said,
"Cornwall must go to Nevada for her copper," and there are more Cornish
miners in the western states than there are in their native shire.
Penzance is another of the South of England resort towns and is
beautifully situated on Mounts Bay. One indeed wonders at the great
number of seacoast resorts in Britain, but we must remember that there
are forty millions of people in the Kingdom who need breathing places as
well as a number of Americans who come to these resorts. The hotels at
these places are generally excellent from the English point of view,
which differs somewhat from the American. Probably there is no one point
on which the difference is greater than the precise temperature that
constitutes personal comfort and makes a fire in the room necessary. On
a chilly, muggy day when an American shivers and calls for a fire in the
generally diminutive grate in his room, the native enjoys himself or
even complains of the heat, and is astonished at his thin-skinned
cousin, who must have his room--according to the British notion--heated
to suffocation. The hotel manager always makes a very adequate charge
for fires in guest-rooms and is generally chary about warming the
corridors or public parts of the hotel. In one of the large London
hotels which actually boasts of steam heat in the hallways, we were
amazed on a chilly May day to find the pipes warm and a fine fire
blazing in the great fireplace in the lobby. The chambermaid explained
the astonishing phenomenon: the week before several Americans had
complained frequently of the frigid atmosphere of the place without
exciting much sympathy from the management, but after they had left the
hotel, it was taken as an evidence of good faith and the heat was turned
on. But this digression has taken me so far away from Penzance that I
may as well close this chapter with it.