United States or Saint Barthélemy ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Seventeen years later Nat Ellery walked down the hill into Gantick village, and entered the King of the Bells. "I've come," said he, "to inquire about a chest I left here, one time back along." And he told his name and the date. The landlord, Joshua Martin son of old Joshua, who had kept the inn in 1806 rubbed his double chin. "So you be Nat Ellery? I can just mind'ee as a lad.
And all the afternoon the men of Gantick brayed the Devil into shreds. I said there was no cruelty on Dragon's Moor that day. But at sundown the Mayor turned to his mother and said "We've been over-hasty, mother. We ought to ha' found out who made the Devil what he is." At last the sun dropped; a shadow fell on the brown moors and crept up the mound where the mother and son sat.
In the days of my childhood, and up to the year 1886, the Justices of the Peace for the Gantick Division of Hundred of Powder, in the county of Cornwall, held their Petty Sessions at Scawns, a bleak, foursquare building set on the knap of a windy hill, close beside the high road that leads up from the sea to the market town of Tregarrick.
The man was a grizzled artizan looking fellow well over fifty; extraordinarily like the old Thatcher, though darker of skin yellow as a guinea, said Gantick; in fact and beyond doubt, the old man's son. He made no friends, no acquaintances ever, but confined himself to nursing the Thatcher, now tied to his chair by rheumatism.
The small rotund gentleman who had danced and spun all the way to Gantick village from the extreme south of France, and had danced and smiled and blown his flageolet all day in Gantick Street without conciliating its population in the least, was disgusted.
They are all alike; each, built of cob, circular, whitewashed, having pointed windows and a conical roof of thatch with a wooden cross on the apex. When I was a boy these thatched roofs used to be pointed out to me as masterpieces; and they still endure. But the race of skilled thatchers, once the peculiar pride of Gantick, has come to an end.
"Thomas Edwards, you stand charged for that on a certain date, to wit, June 6th, you, not having any visible means of subsistence, and not giving a good account of yourself, were found lodging in a certain outhouse known as Lobb's Barn, in the Parish of Gantick, contrary, etc. Do you plead Guilty or Not Guilty?" "Guilty, y'r Worships."
"Elspeth Mackenzie," I said, "I and two other living men alone know of what your master was accused. It cannot affect him; but these two shall hear your exculpation of him. You enter the village of Gantick between two round-houses set one on each side of the high road where it dips steeply towards the valley bottom.
"Simme," said one in the crowd, "the sins o' Gantick be wearin' out the smoky man at a terrible rate." "Ay," answered another, "His Naughtiness bain't ekal to Gantick." And this observation was the original of a proverb, still repeated "As naughty as Gantick, where the Devil struck for shorter hours." There was no cruelty that day on Dragon's Moor.
What time has eaten modern and clumsy hands have tried to repair; yet a glance will tell you that the old sound work means to outwear the patches. The last of these famous thatchers lived in the round-house on your right as you leave Gantick by the seaward road. Yet he clung to his work, being one of those lean men upon whom age, exposure, and even drink take a long while to tell.
Word Of The Day