THE beginning of this collection of Popular Romances may I
be truly said to date from my early childhood. I remember with what
anticipations of pleasure, sixty-eight years since, I stitched together a few
sheets of paper, and carefully pasted them into the back of an old book. This
was preparatory to a visit I was about to make with my mother to Bodmin, about
which town many strange stories were told, and my purpose was to record them.
My memory retains dim shadows of a wild tale of Hender the Huntsman of
Lanhydrock; of a narrative of streams having been poisoned by the monks; and
of a legend of a devil who. played many strange pranks with the tower which
stands on a neighbouring hill. I have, within the last year? endeavoured to
recover those stories, but in vain. The living people appear to have forgotten
them; my juvenile note-book has long been lost those traditions are, it is to
be feared, gone for ever. Robert Hunt
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