78 Legends of Parishes, etc. standing at the door of his house the night he was buried — ^the funeral, according to an old custom, had taken place at midnight. For years after he might be met in the vicinity of his home, and he and his boon companions were often heard carousing at nights in a summer-house on the bowling-green. Few then cared to pass Kenegie after dark, for his was said not to be the only spirit that haunted the place. Wild Harris's ghost was finally laid to rest by a famous ghost-laying parson, and put as a task to count the blades of grass nine times in an enclosure on the top of Castle-an-Dinas, an old earth fortification near where he is said to have met his death.* Ghosts only " walk " (appear) in the parish where their bodies were buried. On the opposite side of Buryan to the Quakers' burial-ground is the parish of Paul (St. Pol-de-Leon). Its church was burnt by the Spaniards in 1595. They landed on a rock, said to have been named after Merlin — Merlin's car, and marched from Paul to Penzance, which they also fired in several places. I am afraid the inhabitants did not make a very bold stand against them ; for Merlin had prophesied centuries before — " That they should land on the rock of Merlin, Who would bum Paul, Penzance, and Newlyn." And this caused them to lose courage, and falsify the old proverb : " Car and Pen, Pol and Tre, Would make the devil run away." Close by the highway, where the Buryan road joins the high-road from Paul to Penzance, is a smoothly-cut, conical granite stone, popularly supposed to have been placed there in memory of some woman who was found murdered at that spot, with nothing on to identify her, and with only a thimble and ring in her pocket. It really marks the place where an ancient gold ring, three inches and a half in diameter, bearing the motto, " In hac spe vivo," was dis- covered in 1 78 1. In the same parish, a short walk from this place,
- There is a small enclosure near the castle, where several members of the family of Hosking
were interred, owing to a quarrel that Mr. Hosking had with the vicar of Ludgvau over some tithes. The last funeral took place in 1823, On one of the stones is inscribed, " It is virtue alone that consecrates this ground," and *' Custom is the idol of fools."
