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Broken twigs, whirling down the wind, smote me in the dark, fallen branches reached out arms that grappled me unseen, but I held on steadfastly, since every stride carried me nearer to vengeance, that vengeance for the which I prayed and lived. So with bared head lifted exulting to the tempest and grasping the stout hedge-stake that served me for staff, I climbed the long ascent of Pembury Hill.
These persons, infuriated by drink, were capable of anything, and to them, accordingly, the more sober parties gladly surrendered the disagreeable job of rendering the supposed vampyre perfectly innoxious, by driving a hedge-stake through his body a proceeding which, it was currently believed, inflicted so much physical injury to the frame, as to render his resuscitation out of the question.
Joyce's place faced the window, so that she could see the lawn and the hedge bounding the kitchen garden; and when Mother had served her with food, she was left alone to eat it. Presently the gardener and the boot-boy passed the window, each carrying a hedge-stake and looking war-like. There reached her a murmur of voices; the gardener was mumbling something about tramps.
Two of these had dispositions as malicious as those of two old apes. They assured me that the geese had no right to be there; and that it was necessary we should kill them, as they were trespassing on our master’s grass. The scamps then furnished me with a hedge-stake.
'Carle, I thought, 'were I thou or such as thou, then would I take in my hand a sword or a spear, or were it only a hedge-stake, and bid others do the like, and forth would we go; and since we would be so many, and with nought to lose save a miserable life, we would do battle and prevail, and make an end of the craft of kings and of lords and of usurers, and there should be but one craft in the world, to wit, to work merrily for ourselves and to live merrily thereby."
A few days later he enlarged further on this sportive simile in a letter to his Wittenberg table-companions, i.e. the young men of the university who, according to custom, boarded with him. He was delighted to see how valiantly these knights of the Diet strutted about and wiped their bills, and he hoped they might some day or other be spitted on a hedge-stake.
The man attempted to get up, but, in doing so, he received a heavy blow from a hedge-stake, wielded by the herculean arm of a peasant. The sound of the blow was heard by those immediately around, and the man fell dead. There was a pause, and those nearest, apparently fearful of the consequences, and hardly expecting the catastrophe, began to disperse, and the remainder did so very soon afterwards.
'Where would you 'a buried 'im, then, Muster Lantoff? asked a fisher-boy in a blue worsted jerkin. 'Buried 'im? why, at the cross-ruds, with a hedge-stake through his guts, to be sure. 'You blear-eyed, ignorant old donkey, I cried, coming suddenly upon him, 'what do you suppose he could have done with a dead body in these days?
I've often watched and watched him, as he has sat slicing away at a hedge-stake with his great clasp-knife, till I have thought that it is just such men as he who have decoyed their sweethearts into lonely places, and murdered them for being false to their word. When he was a boy he was always violent and revengeful. I saw him once take up that very knife in a quarrel with his mother.
We cannot, for we revolt at the office, describe particularly the dreadful outrage which was committed upon the corpse; suffice it that two or three, maddened by drink, and incited by the others, plunged the hedge-stake through the body, and there left it, a sickening and horrible spectacle to any one who might cast his eyes upon it.
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