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Two-shoes, who can only borrow ten pounds of them; but Grace was a poor simple West-country girl; and as such we must excuse her, if, curtseying to the very ground, with tears of gratitude in her eyes, she took the ten-pound note, saying to herself, "Thank the Good Lord! This will just pay mother's account at the mill."
The crew of the Ruby were chiefly west-country folk, and even had it been known on board that the rescued people were slaves condemned for joining Monmouth's rebellion, they would have gained the sympathy of those on board, with the exception, perhaps, of the gentlemen lieutenants and a few others. Nearly a week passed before the mate was able to leave his hammock.
Grace obeyed uncomplaining, but utterly shocked; though she was not unacquainted with those frightful fits of morose unbelief, even of fierce blasphemy, to which the excitable West-country mind is liable, after having been over-strained by superstitious self-inspection, and by the desperate attempt to prove itself right and safe from frames and feelings, while fact and conscience proclaim it wrong.
Whilst I was in a blue study, up came chicken, ham, oysters, bread and butter, with the ale. I drew to the table and began with a keen West-country appetite, and for the first ten minutes forgot Lucy, baker’s horse, pound notes and gloves, and almost that it was growing dark, and that we were to sail by the next morning’s tide.
You want me, and I'm coming there!" Fred had neither time nor inclination to combat his follower's desire; in fact, he was rather glad to have the sturdy, west-country man at his elbow, so he rode up to the main portion of the regiment, selected eleven out of a hundred who wanted to go with the young officer, and rode off at a moderate trot across country, forded the stream, and then, bearing away from the woodland, made as if to leave it on his right, so as not to excite suspicion in case they were seen.
They belonged to a West-country ship that is to say, one manned from the Dockyard Port of Plymouth. The master of the tug, whose interest in such matters was, to say the least of it, cosmopolitan, had anchored between two Portsmouth-manned Battleships. The position he had selected commanded a full view of the course, and there his responsibilities in the affair ended.
A cousin of mine Richard East had been persuaded by a certain bishop to accept an urban charge. I fancy the said bishop had been reared in a rather strait school of enthusiasts, who regarded work in slums as ideally the best sphere for clerics of activity. So he had routed my cousin out of his west-country village, and brought him to a big town my cousin, who was an outdoor man from his youth.
They rushed in amongst us, pouring blessings on our heads, in their strange burring west-country speech, and embracing our horses as well as ourselves. Preparations were soon made for our weary companions. A long empty wool warehouse, thickly littered with straw, was put at their disposal, with a tub of ale and a plentiful supply of cold meats and wheaten bread.
There were some among the crew who set the matter down as the doing of the evil one, but, as Captain Elias Hopkins was wont to remark, it was a strange thing that the foul fiend should choose West-country hymns for his nightly exercise, and stranger still that the dwellers in the pit should sing with a strong Somersetshire burr.
The attendant sailor, reinstalled to some complacency by the failure of another in the search in which he himself had been unsuccessful, now put in his explanation. 'Maybe it was a spirit. It's not th' first time as I've heared of a spirit coming upon earth to save a man's life i' time o' need. My father had an uncle, a west-country grazier.
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