Michael Penguyne Fisher Life on the Cornish Coast   By: William Henry Giles Kingston (1814-1880)

In this rather short book Kingston tells us of the hard life and its few pleasures of the fisher folk of Cornwall. Gales and a forbidding coast line can often spell disaster to the poor fisherman caught out in a rising tempest. Yet throughout this he and his family, with few exceptions, remain steadfast and God fearing, with relatives springing to the aid of orphans and wives following a tragedy.

Kingston is here at his most persuasively Christian, arguing that both the good things of life and the bad, are dealt out to us by an all seeing fatherlike God.

It does not take long to read, but you will certainly enjoy it. As it probably didn't take long to write it is not one of Kingston's great masterpieces, but it is certainly worth taking note of.

MICHAEL PENGUYNE, FISHER LIFE ON THE CORNISH COAST, BY WILLIAM H G KINGSTON.

CHAPTER ONE.

As the sun rose over the Lizard, the southernmost point of old England, his rays fell on the tanned sails of a fleet of boats bounding lightly across the heaving waves before a fresh westerly breeze. The distant shore, presenting a line of tall cliffs, towards which the boats were steering, still lay in the deepest shade.

Each boat was laden with a large heap of nets and several baskets filled with brightly shining fish.

In the stern of one, tiller in hand, sat a strongly built man, whose deeply furrowed countenance and grizzled hair showed that he had been for many a year a toiler on the ocean. By his side was a boy of about twelve years of age, dressed in flushing coat and sou'wester, busily employed with a marline spike, in splicing an eye to a rope's end.

The elder fisherman, now looking up at his sails, now stooping down to get a glance beneath them at the shore, and then turning his head towards the south west, where heavy clouds were gathering fast, meanwhile cast an approving look at the boy.

"Ye are turning in that eye smartly and well, Michael," he said. "Whatever you do, try and do it in that fashion. It has been my wish to teach you what is right as well as I know it. Try not only to please man, my boy, but to love and serve God, whose eye is always on you. Don't forget the golden rule either: `Do to others as you would they should do to you.'"

"I have always wished to understand what you have told me, and tried to obey you, father," said the boy.

"You have been a good lad, Michael, and have more than repaid me for any trouble you may have caused me. You are getting a big boy now, though, and it's time that you should know certain matters about yourself which no one else is so well able to tell you as I am."

The boy looked up from his work, wondering what Paul Trefusis was going to say.

"You know, lad, that you are called Michael Penguyne, and that my name is Paul Trefusis. Has it never crossed your mind that though I have always treated you as a son and you have ever behaved towards me as a good and dutiful son should behave that you were not really my own child?"

"To say the truth, I have never thought about it, father," answered the boy, looking up frankly in the old man's face. "I am oftener called Trefusis than Penguyne, so I fancied that Penguyne was another name tacked on to Michael, and that Trefusis was just as much my name as yours. And oh! father, I would rather be your child than the son of anybody else."