traceries, with baskets of flowers, sea-monsters, Cherubim, tying the
filigree-work and looping it together in knots and centres.
One panel had for subject a spider midmost in a web, to visit which
smiths came hundreds of miles, from all over the country, and
wondered. For it was impossible to guess how iron had ever been
beaten to such thinness or drawn so ductile. But unhappily-and
priceless as was the secret Young John Cara had chosen to let die
with him--the art of it was frail, frail as the titlark's song.
His masterpiece, indeed, had in it the corruption of Celtic art.
It could not endure its native weather, and rusted away almost to
nothingness. When the late Sir Gilbert Aubyn, the famous neo-Gothic
architect, was called in (1885) to restore Porthennis Church--or, as
we say in Cornwall, to "restroy" it--he swept the remnants away.
But the legend survives, _ferro perennius_.



NOT HERE, O APPOLLO!


A CHRISTMAS STORY HEARD AT MIDSUMMER.

We sat and talked in the Vicarage garden overlooking Mount's Bay.
The long summer day lingered out its departure, although the full
moon was up and already touching with a faint radiance the towers on
St. Michael's Mount--'the guarded Mount'--that rested as though at
anchor in the silver-grey offing. The land-breeze had died down
with sunset; the Atlantic lay smooth as a lake below us, and melted,
league upon league, without horizon into the grey of night.
Between the Vicar's fuchsia-bushes we looked down on it, we three--