“At last there came on a dreadful wave, mast-top high, and away went the mast by the board, and we with it, into the sea. I gave myself up. I was the only man on the ship that could not swim, so where I fell in the water there I lay. I felt the waves beat me and send me on. At last there was a rock under my hand. I clung on. Just then I saw Alick Kant, one of our crew, swimming past. I saw him lay his hand on a rock, and I sung out, ‘Hold on, Alick!’ but a wave rolled and swept him away, and I never saw his face more. I was beaten onward and onward among the rocks and the tide, and at last I felt the ground with my feet. I scrambled on. I saw the cliff, steep and dark, above my head. I climbed up until I reached a kind of platform with grass, and there I fell down flat upon my face, and either I fainted away or I fell asleep. There I lay a long time, and when I awoke it was just the break of day. There was a little yellow flower just under my head, and when I saw that I knew I was on dry land.” This was a plant of the bird’s-foot clover, called in old times Our Lady’s Finger. He went on: “I could see no house or sign of people, and the country looked to me like some wild and desert island. At last I felt very thirsty, and I tried to get down towards a valley where I thought I should find water; but before I could reach it I fell and grew faint again, and there, thank God, sir, you found me.”
Such was Le Daine’s sad and simple story, and no one could listen unmoved or without a strong feeling of interest and compassion for the poor solitary survivor of his shipmates and crew. The coroner arrived, held his ’quest, and the usual verdict of “Wrecked and cast ashore” empowered me to inter the dead sailors, found and future, from the same vessel, with the service in the Prayer-book for the Burial of the Dead. This decency of sepulture is the result of a somewhat recent statute, passed in the reign of George III. Before that time it was the common usage of the coast to dig, just above high-water mark, a pit on the shore, and therein to cast, without inquest or religious rite, the carcasses of shipwrecked men. My first funeral of these lost mariners was a touching and striking scene. The three bodies first found were buried at the same time. Behind the coffins, as they were solemnly borne along the aisle, walked the solitary mourner, Le Daine, weeping bitterly and aloud. Other eyes were moist, for who could hear unsoftened the greeting of the Church to these strangers from the sea, and the “touch that makes the whole earth kin,” in the hope we breathed that we, too, might one day “rest as these our brethren did”? It was well-nigh too much for those who served that day. Nor was the interest subdued when, on the Sunday after the wreck, at the appointed place in the service, just before the General Thanksgiving, Le Daine rose up from his place, approached the altar, and uttered, in an audible but broken voice, his thanksgiving for his singular and safe deliverance from the perils of the sea.
The text of the sermon that day demands its history. Some time before, a vessel, the Hero of Liverpool, was seen in distress, in the offing of a neighbouring harbour, during a storm. The crew, mistaking a signal from the beach, betook themselves to their boat. It foundered, and the whole ship’s company, twelve in number, were drowned in sight of the shore. But the stout ship held together, and drifted on to the land so unshattered by the sea that the coast-guard, who went immediately on board, found the fire burning in the cabin. When the vessel came to be examined, they found in one of the berths a Bible, and between its leaves a sheet of paper, whereon some recent hand had transcribed verses the twenty-first, twenty-second, and twenty-third of the thirty-third chapter of Isaiah. The same hand had also marked the passage with a line of ink along the margin. The name of the owner of the book was also found inscribed on the fly-leaf. He was a youth of eighteen years of age, the son of a widow, and a statement under his name recorded that the Bible was “a reward for his good conduct in a Sunday-school.” This text, so identified and enforced by a hand that soon after grew cold, appeared strangely and strikingly adapted to the funeral of shipwrecked men; and it was therefore chosen as the theme for our solemn day. The very hearts of the people seemed hushed to hear it, and every eye was turned towards Le Daine, who bowed his head upon his hands and wept. These are the words: “But there the glorious Lord will be unto us a place of broad rivers and streams; wherein shall go no galley with oars, neither shall gallant ship pass thereby. For the Lord is our judge, the Lord is our lawgiver, the Lord is our king; He will save us. The tacklings are loosed; they could not well strengthen their mast, they could not spread the sail: then is the prey of a great spoil divided; the lame take the prey.” Shall I be forgiven for the vaunt, if I declare that there was not literally a single face that day unmoistened and unmoved? Few, indeed, could have borne, without deep emotion, to see and hear Le Daine. He remained as my guest six weeks, and during the whole of this time we sought diligently, and at last we found the whole crew, nine in number. They were discovered, some under rocks, jammed in by the force of the water, so that it took sometimes several ebb-tides, and the strength of many hands, to extricate the corpses. The captain I came upon myself lying placidly upon his back, with his arms folded in the very gesture which Le Daine had described as he stood amid the crew on the maintop. The hand of the spoiler was about to assail him when I suddenly appeared, so that I rescued him untouched. Each hand grasped a small pouch or bag. One contained his pistols; the other held two little log-reckoners[49] of brass; so that his last thoughts were full of duty to his owners and his ship, and his latest efforts for rescue and defence. He had been manifestly lifted by a billow and hurled against a rock, and so slain; for the victims of our cruel sea are seldom drowned, but beaten to death by violence and the wrath of the billows. We gathered together one poor fellow in five parts; his limbs had been wrenched off, and his body rent. During our search for his remains, a man came up to me with something in his hand, inquiring, “Can you tell me, sir, what is this? Is it a part of a man?” It was the mangled seaman’s heart, and we restored it reverently to its place, where it had once beat high with life and courage, with thrilling hope and sickening fear. Two or three of the dead were not discovered for four or five weeks after the wreck, and these had become so loathsome from decay, that it was at peril of health and life to perform the last duties we owe to our brother-men. But hearts and hands were found for the work, and at last the good ship’s company—captain, mate, and crew—were laid at rest, side by side, beneath our churchyard trees. Groups of grateful letters from Arbroath[50] are to this day among the most cherished memorials of my escritoire. Some, written by the friends of the dead, are marvellous proofs of the good feeling and educated ability of the Scottish people. One from a father breaks off in irrepressible pathos, with a burst of “O my son! my son!” We placed at the foot of the captain’s grave the figurehead[51] of his vessel. It is a carved image, life-size, of his native Caledonia, in the garb of her country, with sword and shield.
At the end of about six weeks Le Daine left my house on his homeward way, a sadder and a richer man. Gifts had been proffered from many a hand, so that he was able to return to Jersey, with happy and grateful mien, well clothed, and with £30 in his purse. His recollections of our scenery were not such as were in former times associated with the Cornish shore; for three years afterward he returned to the place of his disaster accompanied by his uncle, sister, and affianced wife, and he had brought them that, in his own joyous words, “they might see the very spot of his great deliverance:” and there, one summer day, they stood, a group of happy faces, gazing with wonder and gratitude on our rugged cliffs, that were then clad in that gorgeous vesture of purple and gold which the heather and gorse wind and weave along the heights; and the soft blue wave lapping the sand in gentle cadence, as though the sea had never wreaked an impulse of ferocity, or rent a helpless prey. Nor was the thankfulness of the sailor a barren feeling. Whensoever afterward the vicar sought to purchase for his dairy a Jersey cow, the family and friends of Le Daine rejoiced to ransack the island until they had found the sleekiest, loveliest, best of that beautiful breed; and it is to the gratitude of that poor seaman and stranger from a distant abode that the herd of the glebe has long been famous in the land, and hence, as Homer would have sung—hence came
Strange to say, Le Daine has been twice shipwrecked since his first peril—with similar loss of property, but escape of life; and he is now the master of a vessel in the trade of the Levant.
In the following year a new and another wreck was announced in the gloom of night. A schooner under bare poles had been watched for many hours from the cliffs, with the steersman fastened at the wheel. All at once she tacked and made for the shore, and just as she had reached a creek between two reefs of rock, she foundered and went down. At break of day only her vane was visible to mark her billowy grave. Not a vestige could be seen of her crew. But in the course of the day her boat was drifted ashore, and we found from the name on the stern that the vessel was the Phœnix of St. Ives. A letter from myself by immediate post brought up next day from that place a sailor who introduced himself as the brother of a young man who had sailed as mate in the wrecked ship. He was a rough plain-spoken man, of simple religious cast, without guile or pretence: one of the good old seafaring sort—the men who “go down to the sea in ships, and occupy their business in great waters:” these, as the Psalmist chants, “see the wonders of the Lord, and His glories in the deep.” At my side he paced the shore day after day in weary quest of the dead. “If I could but get my poor brother’s bones,” he cried out yearningly again and again, “if I could but lay him in the earth, how it would comfort dear mother at home!” We searched every cranny in the rocks, and we watched every surging wave, until hope was exchanged for despair. A reward of meagre import, it is true, offered by the Seaman’s Burial Act, to which I have referred, and within my own domain doubled always by myself, brought us many a comrade in this sickening scrutiny, but for long it was in vain. At last one day, while we were scattered over a broken stretch of jumbled rocks that lay in huddled masses along the base of the cliffs, a loud and sudden shout called me where the seaman of St. Ives stood. He was gazing down into the broken sea—it was on a spot near low-water mark—and there, just visible from underneath a mighty fragment of rock, was seen the ankle of a man and a foot still wearing a shoe. “It is my brother!” yelled the sailor, bitterly; “it is our own dear Jem—I can swear to that shoe!” We gathered around; the tide ebbed a very little after this discovery, and only just enough to leave dry the surface of the rock under which the body lay. Soon the sea began again to flow, and very quickly we were driven by the rising surges from the spot. The anguish of the mourner for his dead was thrilling to behold and terrible to hear. “O my brother! my brother!” was his sob again and again; “what a burial-place for our own dear merry boy!” I tried to soothe him, but in vain: the only theme to which he could be brought to listen was the chance—and I confess it seemed to my own secret mind a hopeless thought—that it might be possible at the next ebb-tide, by skill and strength combined, to move, if ever so little, the monstrous rock, and so recover the corpse. It was low water at evening tide, and there was a bright November moon. We gathered in numbers, for among my parishioners there were kind and gentle-hearted men, such as had “pity, tenderness, and tears,” and all were moved by the tale of the sailor, hurled and buried beneath a rock, by the strong and cruel sea. The scene of our first nightly assemblage was a weird and striking sight. Far, far above loomed the tall and gloomy headlands of the coast: around us foamed and raged the boiling waves: the moon cast her massive lowering shadows on rock and sea—
Stout and stalwart forms surrounded me, wielding their iron bars, pickaxes, and ropes. Their efforts were strenuous but unavailing. The tide soon returned in its strength, and drove us, baffled, from the spot before we had been able to grasp or shake the ponderous mass. It was calculated by competent judges that its weight was full fifteen tons: neither could there be a more graphic image of the resistless strength of the wrathful sea than the aspect of this and similar blocks of rifted stone, that were raised and rolled perpetually, by the power of the billows, and hurled, as in some pastime of the giants, along the shuddering shore! Deep and bitter was the grief of the sailor at our failure and retreat. His piteous wail over the dead recalled the agony of those who are recorded in Holy Writ, they who grieved for their lost ones, “and would not be comforted because they were not!” That night an inspiration visited me in my wakeful bed. At a neighbouring harbour[53] dwelt a relative[54] of mine, who was an engineer, in charge of the machinery on a breakwater and canal. To him at morning light I sent an appeal for succour, and he immediately responded with aidance and advice. Two strong windlasses, worked by iron chains, and three or four skilful men, were sent up by him next day with instructions for their work. Again at evening ebb we were all on the spot. One of our new assistants, a very Tubal-Cain in aspect and stature, and of the same craft with that smith before the Flood, plunged upon the rock as the water reluctantly revealed its upper side, and drilled a couple of holes in the surface with rapid energy, to receive, each of them, that which he called a Lewis-wedge and a ring. To these the chains of the windlasses were fastened on. They then looped a rope around the ankle of the corpse and gave it as the post of honour to me to hold. It was on the evening of Sunday that all this was done, and I had deemed it a venial breach of discipline to omit the nightly service of the Church in order to suit the tide. A Puseyite bishop might have condemned my breach of Rubric and Ritual, but I exercise episcopal authority in my own parish, and accordingly I absolved myself. Forty strong parishioners, all absentees from evening prayer, manned the double windlass power; I intoned the pull; and by a strong and blended effort the rocky mass was slowly, silently, and gently upheaved: a slight haul at the rope, and up to our startled view, and to the sudden lights, came forth the altered, ghastly, flattened semblance of a man! “My brother! my brother!” shrieked a well-known voice at my side, and tears of gratitude and suffering gushed in mingled torrent over his rugged cheek. A coffin had been made ready, under the hope of final success, and therein we reverently laid the poor disfigured carcass of one who a little while before had been the young and joyous inmate of a fond and happy home. We had to clamber up a steep and difficult pathway along the cliff with the body, which was carried by the bearers in a kind of funeral train. The vicar of course led the way. When we were about halfway up a singular and striking event occurred, which moved us all exceedingly. Unobserved—for all were intent on their solemn task—a vessel had neared the shore; she lay to, and, as it seemed, had watched us with night-glasses from the deck, or had discerned us from the torches and lanterns in our hands. For all at once there sounded along the air three deep and thrilling cheers! And we could see that the crew on board had manned their yards. It was manifest that their loyal and hearty voices and gestures were intended to greet and gratulate our fulfilment of duty to a brother mariner’s remains. The burial-place of the dead sailors in this churchyard is a fair and fitting scene for their quiet rest. Full in view and audible in sound for ever rolls the sea. Is it not to them a soothing requiem that
Trees stand, like warders, beside their graves; and the Saxon and shingled church, “the mother of us all,” dwells in silence by, to watch and wail over her safe and slumbering dead. It recalls the imagery of the Holy Book wherein we read of the gathered relics of the ancient slain: “And Rizpah the daughter of Aiah took sackcloth and spread it for her upon the rock from the beginning of harvest until water dropped upon them out of heaven, and suffered neither the birds of the air to rest on them by day, nor the beasts of the field by night.” In such a shelter we laid our brother at rest, rescued from the unhallowed sepulture of the rock; and there the faithful voice of the mourner breathed a last farewell. “Good-bye,” he said, “good-bye! Safe and quiet in the ground!”
A year had passed away when the return of the equinox admonished us again to listen for storms and wrecks. There are men in this district whose usage it is at every outbreak of a gale of wind to watch and ward the cliffs from rise to set of sun. Of these my quaint old parishioner, Peter Burrow, was one. On a wild and dreary winter day I found myself seated on a rock with Peter standing by, at a point that overhung the sea. We were both gazing with anxious dismay at a ship which was beating to and fro in the Channel, and had now drifted much too near to the surges and the shore. She had come into sight some hours before struggling with Harty Race, the local name of a narrow and boisterous run of sea between Lundy and the land, and she was now within three or four miles of our rocks. “Ah, sir,” said Peter, “the coastmen say,
And I think the poor fellows off there will find it so.” All at once, as we still watched the vessel labouring on the sea, a boat was launched over her side, and several men plunged into it one by one. With strained and anxious eyes we searched the billows for the course of the boat. Sometimes we caught a glimpse as it rode upon some surging wave; then it disappeared a while, and no trace was visible for long. At last we could see it no more. Meanwhile the vessel held down Channel, tacked and steered as if still beneath the guidance of some of her crew, although it must have been in sheer desperation that they still hugged the shore. What was to be done? If she struck, the men still on board must perish without help, for nightfall drew on; if the boat reappeared, Peter could make a signal where to land. In hot haste, then, I made for the vicarage, ordered my horse, and returned towards the cliffs. The ship rode on, and I accompanied her way along the shore. She reached the offing of a neighbouring haven, and there grounded on the sand. No boatman could be induced to put off, and thick darkness soon after fell. I returned worn, heart-sick, and weary on my homeward way; there strange tidings greeted me,—the boat which we had watched so long had been rolled ashore by the billows empty. Peter Burrow had hauled her above high-water mark, and had found a name, “The Alonzo, of Stockton-on-Tees,” on her stern. That night I wrote as usual to the owner, with news of the wreck, and the next day we were able to guess at the misfortunes of the stranded ship: a boat had visited the vessel, and found her freighted with iron from Gloucester for a Queen’s yard round the Land’s End. Her papers in the cabin showed that her crew of nine men had been reported all sound and well three days before. The owner’s agent arrived, and he stated that her captain was a brave and trusty officer, and that he must have been compelled by his men to join them when they deserted the ship. They must all have been swamped and lost not long after the launch of the boat, and while we watched for them in vain amid the waves. Then ensued what has long been with me the saddest and most painful duty of the shore: we sought and waited for the dead. Now there is a folk-lore of the beach that no corpse will float or be found until the ninth day after death. The truth is, that about that time the body proceeds to decompose, and as a natural result it ascends to the surface of the current, is brought into the shallows of the tide, and is there found. The owner’s representative was my guest for ten days, and with the help of the ship’s papers and his own personal knowledge we were able to identify the dead. First of all the body of the captain came in; he was a fine, stalwart, and resolute-looking man. His countenance, however, had a grim and angry aspect, and his features wore somewhat of a fierce and reproachful look—just such an expression as would verify the truth of our suspicion that he had been driven by the violence of others to forsake his deck. The face of the dead man was as graphic a record of his living character as a physiognomist could portray. Then arrived the mate and three other men of the crew. None were placid of feature or calm and pleasant in look, as those usually are who are accidentally drowned or who die in their beds. But many of them had that awful expression of countenance which reminded me of a picture once described to me as the result of an experiment by certain artists in France. It was during the Revolution, and amid the anarchy of those times, that they bought a criminal who had been condemned to die, fastened him to a cross, and painted him for a crucifixion; but his face wore the aspect, not of the patient suffering which they intended to portray, but a strong expression of reluctant agony. Such has been the look that I myself have witnessed in many a poor disfigured corpse. The death-struggle of the conscious victim in the strong and cruel grasp of the remorseless sea was depicted in harsh and vivid lines on the brow of the dead.
But one day my strange old man, Peter Burrow, came to me in triumphant haste with the loud greeting, “Sir, we have got a noble corpse down on your beach! We have just laid him down above high-water mark, and he is as comely a body as a man shall see!” I made haste to the spot, and there lay, with the light of a calm and wintry day falling on his manly form, a fine and stately example of a man: he was six feet two inches in height, of firm and accurate proportion throughout; and he must have been, indeed, in life a shape of noble symmetry and grace. On his broad smooth chest was tattooed a rood—that is to say, in artist phrase, our blessed Saviour on His cross, with, on the one hand, His mother, and on the other St. John the evangelist: underneath were the initial letters of a name, “P. B.” His arms also were marked with tracery in the same blue lines. On his right arm was engraved “P. B.” again, and “E. M.,” the letters linked with a wreath; and on his left arm was an anchor, as I imagined the symbol of hope, and the small blue forget-me-not flower. The greater number of my dead sailors—and I have myself said the burial service over forty-two such men rescued from the sea—were so decorated with some distinctive emblem and name; and it is their object and intent, when they assume these pictured signs, to secure identity for their bodies if their lives are lost at sea, and then, for the solace of their friends, should they be cast on the shore and taken up for burial in the earth. What a volume of heroism and resignation to a mournful probability in this calm foresight and deliberate choice, to wear always on their living flesh, as it were, the signature of a sepulchral name! The symbolic figures and the letters which were supposed to designate our dead were all faithfully transcribed and duly entered in the vicar’s book. We carried the strangely decorated man to his comrades of the deck; and gradually, in the course of one month, we discovered and carefully buried the total crew of nine strong men. These gathered strangers, the united assemblage from many a distant and diverse abode, now calmly slept among our rural and homely graves, the stout seamen of the ship Alonzo, of Stockton-on-Tees! The boat which had foundered with them we brought also to the churchyard, and there, just by their place of rest, we placed her beside them, keel upward to the sky, in token that her work, too, was over and her voyage done. There her timbers slowly moulder still, and by-and-by her dust will mingle in the scenery of death with the ashes of those living hearts and hands that manned her, in their last unavailing launch and fruitless struggle for the mastery of life! But the history of the Alonzo is not yet closed. Three years afterwards a letter arrived from the Danish consul at a neighbouring seaport town, addressed to myself as the vicar of the parish; and the hope of the writer was that he might be able to ascertain through myself, for two anxious and grieving parents in Denmark, tidings of their lost son. His name, he said, was Philip Bengstein, and it was in the correspondence that this strange and touching history transpired. The father, who immediately afterward wrote to my address, told me in tearful words, that his son, bearing that name, had gone away from his native home because his parents had resisted a marriage which he was desirous to contract. They found that he had gone to sea before the mast, a position much below his station in life; and they had traced him from ship to ship, until at last they found him on the papers of the Alonzo, of Stockton-on-Tees. Then their inquiry as to the fate of that vessel had led them to the knowledge through the owners that the vicar of a parish on the seaboard of North Cornwall could in all likelihood convey to them some tidings of their long-lost son. I related in reply the history of the death, discovery, and burial of the unfortunate young man. I was enabled to verify and to understand the initial letters of his own name, and of her who was not to become his bride—although she still clung to his memory in loving loneliness in that foreign land! Ample evidence, therefore, verified his corpse, and I was proudly enabled to certify to his parents the reverent burial of their child. A letter is treasured among my papers filled to overflowing with the strong and earnest gratitude of a stranger and a Dane for the kindness we had rendered to one who loved “not wisely,” perchance, “but too well,” to that son who had been lost and was found too late: one, too, “whose course of true love” had brought him from distant Denmark to a green hillock among the dead, beneath a lonely tower among the trees, by the Cornish sea! What a picture was that which we saw painted upon the bosom and the limbs of a dead man, of fond and faithful love, of severed and broken hearts, of disappointed hope, of a vacant chair and a hushed voice in a far-away Danish home! Linked with such themes as these which I have related in this Remembrance are the subjoined verses, which were written on a rock by the shore.
“BLACK JOHN”
From a picture formerly belonging to R. S. Hawker, now in the possession of Mrs. Calmady
A picture hangs in my library—and it is one of my most treasured relics of old Cornwall—the full-length and “counterfeit presentment,” in oil, of a quaint and singular dwarf. It exhibits a squat figure, uncouth and original, just such a one as Frederick Taylor would delight to introduce in one of his out-of-door pieces of Elizabethan days, as an appendage to the rural lady’s state when she rode afield with her hawk on her wrist. His height is under four feet, hump-backed and misshapen; his head, with tangled elfy hair falling wildly on his shoulders, droops upon his chest. Negro features and a dark skin surround a loose and flabby mouth, which teeth have long ceased to harmonise and fill out. He is clad in a loose antique russet gaberdine, the fashion of a past century: one hand leans on a gnarled staff, and the other holds a wide-brimmed felt hat, with humble gesture and look, as though his master stood by.
The traditionary name of this well-remembered character on the Tamar-side is Black John. He lived from the commencement to the middle of the eighteenth century in the household of an honoured name, Arscott of Tetcott,[56] an ancestor of one of the distinguished families of Cornwall; and as his master was wellnigh the last of the jovial open-housed squires of the West of England, so was Black John the last of the jesters or makers of mirth. When the feast was over, and the “wrath of hunger”[57] had been assuaged, while the hare’s or fox’s head, the festive drinking-cup of silver, went round with the nectar of the Georgian era, “strong punch for strong heads,” the jester was called in to contribute by merry antic and jocose saying to the loud enjoyment of the guests. Such were the functions sustained by my pictured and storied dwarf, and many an anecdote still survives around us in hearth and hall of the feats and stories of the “Tetcott merry-man.” Two of his usual after-dinner achievements were better suited to the rude jollity and coarse mirth of our forefathers than to the refinements of our own time; although they are said to exist here and there, among the “underground men” and miners of Western Cornwall, even to this day. These were “sparrow-mumbling” and swallowing living mice, which were tethered to a string to ensure their safe return to light and life. In the first of these accomplishments, a sparrow, alive, was fastened to the teeth of the artist with a cord, and he was expected to mumble off the feathers from the fluttering and astonished bird, with his lips alone, until he was plucked quite bare without the assistance or touch of finger or hand. A couple of projecting tusks or fangs, such as are called by the Italians Bourbon teeth, were of singular value as sparrow-holders to Black John; but these were one day drawn by violence from his mouth by an exasperated blacksmith, whose kitten had been slain, and who had been persuaded by a wretch, who was himself the actual assassin, that it was the jester who had guillotined the poor creature with his formidable jaws. The passage of the mouse was accomplished very often, amid roars of rude applause, down and up the gullet of the dwarf.
A tale is told of him, that one day, after he had for some time amused the guests, and had drank his full share of the ale, he fell, or seemed to fall, asleep. On a sudden he started up with a loud and terrified cry. Questioned as to the cause of his alarm, he answered, “O sir,” to his master, “I was in a sog [sleep], and I had such a dreadful dream! I thought I was dead, and I went where the wicked people go!”
“Ha, John,” said Arscott of Tetcott, in his grim voice, wide awake for a jest or a tale, “then tell us all about what you heard and saw.”
“Well, master, nothing particular.”
“Indeed, John!”
“No, sir; things was going on just as they do upon airth—here in Tetcott Hall—the gentlefolks nearest the fire.”
His master’s house was surrounded with all kinds of tame animals and birds so bold and confiding, from long safety and intercourse, that the rooks would come down at a call and pick up food like pigeons at the very feet of a man. Among the familiar creatures of the Hall were two enormous toads: these were especial favourites with Mr. Arscott, who was a very Chinese in his fondness for the bat and the toad, and who used to feed them very often with his own hands. One morning the family were aroused by sounds near the porch, of battle and fight. A guest from a distant town, who had arrived the night before on a visit, was discovered prone upon the grass, and over him stood as conqueror Black John, belabouring him with his staff. His story was, when rescued and set upon his feet, that on going out to breathe the morning air he had encountered and slain a fierce and venomous reptile—a big bloated creature that came towards him with open mouth. It turned out to be one of the enormous toads, an old and especial pet of master and man, who had heard a sound of feet, and came as usual to be fed, and was ruthlessly put to death; not, however, unavenged, for a wild man of the woods (so the townsman averred) had rushed upon him and knocked him down. When Mr. Arscott had heard the story, he turned on his heel, and never greeted his guest[58] with one farewell word. Black John sobbed and muttered vengeance in his den for many a day for the death of “Old Dawty”—the household name of the toad.
ARSCOTT OF TETCOTT
From the picture by F. Northcote, R.A.
Black John’s lair was a rude hut, which he had wattled for a snug abode, close to the kennel. He loved to retire to it, and sleep near his chosen companions, the hounds. When they were unkennelled, he accompanied and ran with them afoot, and so sinewy and so swift was his stunted form that he was very often in their midst at the death. Then, with the brush of the fox elaborately disposed as the crest of his felt hat, John would make his appearance on the following Sunday at church, where it was displayed, and pompously hung up above his accustomed seat, to his own great delight and the envy of many among the congregation. When the pack found the fox, and the huntsman’s ear was gladdened by their shrill and sudden burst into full cry, Black John’s shout would be heard in the field, with his standing jest, “There they go! there they go! like our missus at home in one of her storms!” As he grew older, and less equal to the exertion of his strong and youthful days, John took to wandering, gipsy-fashion, about the country-side; and he found food and welcome at every cottage and farmhouse. His usual couch was among the reeds or fern of some sheltering brake or wood, and he slept, as he himself used to express it, “rolled up, as warm as a hedgeboar, round his own nose.” One day, in bitter snowy weather, he was found wanting from his accustomed haunts—“one morn they missed him on the usual hill”—and after long search he was discovered shrouded in snow, cold, stiffened, and to all outward appearance dead. He was carried home, and in due course was coffined and borne towards the grave. But there, just as the clergyman[59] who read the service had reached the solemn words which commit the body to the ground, a loud thumping noise was heard within the coffin. The bystanders rent open the lid in hot haste, and up started Black John alive, in amazement, and in furious wrath. He had been in a long deliquium, or death-trance,[60] from cold, and had been restored to life by the motion and warmth of his own funeral ride. As he told the astonished mourners, “He heard the words ‘dust to dust,’ and then,” said he, “I thought it was high time to bumpy.” His words passed into a proverb; and to this very day, when Cornish men in these parts are placed in some sudden extremity, and it becomes necessary to take strong and immediate measures for extrication, the saying is, “It is time to bumpy, as Black John said.” In his anger and mental confusion, Black John ever after attributed his attempted burial to the conspiracy and ill-will of the clergyman, whose words he had interrupted by his sudden resurrection. More than once the reverend gentleman was suddenly assaulted in his walks by a stone hurled at him from a hedge, followed by an angry outcry, in a well-known voice, of “Ha! old Dust-to-dust; here I be, alive and kicking!”
It may be easily believed that Black John was a very refractory subject for clerical interference and admonition. The result of frequent clerical attempts to reform his habits, was a rooted dislike on his part of the black coat and white neckcloth in all its shades and denominations. The visit of the first field-preacher to the precincts of the Hall was signalised by an exhibition of this feeling. John waylaid the poor unsuspecting man, and offered to guide him on his road by a short cut across the park, which, John alleged, would save him a “considerable bit of way.” The treacherous guide led him along a narrow path into a paddock, wherein was shut up for safety Mr. Arscott’s perilous favourite bull. This animal had grown up from calf-hood the wanton but docile companion of Black John, whose wonderful skill in taming all manner of wild animals had made the “sire of the herd” so familiar with his strange warder, that he would follow him and obey his signals and voice like a dog. What took place between the bull and the preacher could only be guessed at.[61] A rush was heard by a passer-by, and a yell; then the rustling of the branches of a tree, and finally a dead thud upon the grass. From the paddock gate some little time after emerged Black John with a fragment of a white cravat in his hand, and this was all, so he steadfastly averred, that ever he could find of “the preacher’s body.” Actually, it was the sole relic of his arrival and existence that survived in those wild parts. He was never heard of more in that region. And although there were rural sceptics who doubted that the bull could have made such quick work of a full-grown man, the story was fearful enough to scare away all wandering preachers from that district while the dwarf lived. On the Sunday following the terrific interview between the preacher and the bull, John took his usual place in church, but, to the astonishment of those who were not in the secret, instead of the usual fox’s brush, a jaunty pennon of white rag floated as the crest of the well-known felt hat.
Black John was long and fondly cherished by his generous master. Mr. Arscott lived like Adam in the garden, surrounded by his animals and pets, each with its familiar and household name; and no man ever more fully realised the truth of the saying that “love makes love,” and that the surest way to kindle kindness is to be kind. Accurately has it been said of him—
None, high or low, during the lifetime of the squire, were allowed with impunity to injure or harass his cross-grained jester, and many a mischievous escapade was hushed up, and the sufferer soothed or pacified by money or influence. When gout and old age had imprisoned Mr. Arscott in his easy-chair, Black John snoozed among the ashes of the vast wood fires of the hearth, or lay coiled upon his rug like some faithful mastiff, watching every look and gesture of his master; starting up to fill the pipe or the tankard of old ale, and then crouching again.
and the good old squire, in the language of the Tamar-side, “passed out of it.” At his death and funeral, the agony of his misshapen retainer was unappeasable. He had to be removed by force from the door of the vault, and then he utterly refused to depart from the neighbourhood of the grave. He made himself another lair, near the churchyard wall, and there he sobbed away the brief remnant of his days, in honest and unavailing grief for the protector whom he had so loved in life, and from whom in death he would not be divided. Thus and there, not long after, he died, as the old men of the parish used to relate, for the “second and last time.” He had what is called in those parts a decent funeral, for his master had bequeathed to him an ample allowance for life and death in his last will. The mourners ate of the fat and drank of the strong, as their Celtic impulses would suggest; and although some among them, who remembered John’s former funeral, may have listened again for a token or sign, poor Black John, alas for him! had no master to come back to now, and declined “to bumpy” any more.
A singular and striking circumstance attended the final funeral of Black John. An aged crone, bent and tottering, “worn Nature’s mournful monument,” was observed following the bier, and the people heard her muttering ever and anon, “Oh, is he really dead? He came to life again once you know, and lived long after.” When assured that all indeed was over, even her wild hope, she cried with a great sob, “O poor dear Johnny! he was so good-looking and so steady till they spoilt him up at the Hall!” Her words recalled her to the memory of some old men who were there, and they knew her as a certain Aunty Bridget, who had been teased and worried, long years agone, at markets and fairs, as “Black John’s sweetheart.”
There is no part of our native country of England so little known, no region so seldom trodden by the feet of the tourist or the traveller, as the middle moorland of old Cornwall. A stretch of wild heath and stunted gorse, dotted with swelling hills, and interspersed with rugged rocks, either of native granite or rough-hewn pillar, the rude memorial of ancient art, spreads from the Severn Sea on the west to the tall ridge of Carradon on the east, and from Warbstow Barrow on the north to the southern civilisation of Bodmin and Liskeard. Throughout this district there is, even in these days, but very scanty sign of settled habitation. Two or three recent and solitary roads traverse the boundaries; here and there the shafts and machinery of a mine announce the existence of underground life; a few clustered cottages, or huts, for the shepherds, are sprinkled along the waste; but the vast and uncultured surface of the soil is suggestive of the bleak steppes of Tartary or the far wilds of Australia, and that in the very heart of modern England. Yet is there no scenery that can be sought by the antiquary or the artist that will so kindle the imagination or requite the eye or the mind of the wanderer as this Cornish solitude. If he travel from our storied Dundagel, eastward, Rowter,[65] the Red Tor, so named from its purple tapestry of heather and heath, and Brunguillie,[66] the Golden Hill, crested with yellow gorse like a crown, will win his approach and reward, with their majestic horizon, the first efforts of his pilgrimage. The summits and sides of these mountains of the west are studded with many a logan-rock[67] or shuddering-stone of the old superstition. This was the pillar of ordeal in Druid times, so poised that while it shook at the slight faint touch of the innocent finger, it firmly withstood the assailing strength of the guilty man.
Passing onward, the traveller will pause amid a winding outline of unhewn granite pillars, and he will gradually discover that these are set up to represent the coils of a gigantic serpent, traced, as it were, in stone. This is a memorial of the dragon-crest of a Viking, or the demon-idol and shrine of an older antiquity. Not far off there gleams a moorland lake or mimic sea, with its rippling laugh of waters—the Dozmere Pool[68] of many an antique legend and tale, the mystic scene[69] of the shadowy vessel and the Mort d’Arthur of our living bard. A sheep-track—for no other visible path will render guidance along the moor—leads on to Kilmarth Tor, from the brow of which lofty crag the eye can embrace the expanse of the two seas which are the boundaries of Cornwall on the right and left. There, too, looms in the distance rocky Carradon, with the valley of the Hurlers at its foot. These tall shapes of granite, grim and grotesque, were once, as local legends say, nine bold upstanding Cornish men who disdained the Sabbath-day; and as they pursued their daring pastime and “put the stone” in spite of the warning of the priest, they were changed, by a sudden doom, where they stood up to play, and so were fixed for ever in monumental rock. Above them lowers the Devil’s Wring, a pile of granite masses, lifted, as though by giant or demon strength, one upon another; but the upper rocks vast and unwieldy, and the lower gradually lessening downward, until they rest, poised, on a pivot of stone so slender and small that it seems as though the wind sweeping over the moor would overtopple it with a breath; and yet centuries many and long have rolled over the heath, and still it stands unshaken and unswerved. Its name is derived from the similitude of the rocky structure to the press wherein the ancient housewives of rude Cornwall were accustomed to “wring” out the milk from their cheese.