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I do not name this latter attribute as a virtue, but as a fact. But all these points were as nothing in the known character of Mr. Woolsworthy, of Oxney Colne. He was the antiquarian of Dartmoor. That was his line of life.
'I fear you are a little high-flown. And then, while the evening was still early, they walked back to the parsonage almost without another word. Captain Broughton at this time had only one more full day to remain at Oxney Colne. On the afternoon following that he was to go as far as Exeter, and thence return to London.
There was little more to be learnt, but I was told that farmers crossing the moors on their way home from Colne market had sometimes heard, among the rocks on the crest of the hills, the sound of a spinning-wheel; but others had laughed at this, and had said that what they had heard was only the cry of the nightjar among the bracken.
Very fair the old place looked to me as we crossed the Colne and saw the walls among the trees on the steep hillside, and the houses nestling against it. The gates were shut, and there was a strong guard along the ramparts on either side, and we halted and summoned the townsfolk to surrender to Ethelred in peace.
Medical assistance was fortunately at hand; for it chanced that Master Sudall, the chirurgeon of Colne, was in the house at the time, having been brought to Goldshaw by the great sickness that prevailed at Sabden and elsewhere in the neighbourhood.
I felt drawn to this old man, whose baptismal name was Timothy Barraclough, but who always answered to the by-name of Tim o' Frolics; and when we had politely assured one another that it was grand weather for the hay and that lambs would soon be making a tidy price at Colne market, I spoke to him of the quest.
Albans, and between that and Watford, I have sometimes, even as early as April, caught fish in good condition; but the true season for the Colne is the season of the May-fly. The same may be said of most of the large English rivers containing large trouts, and abounding in May-fly such as the Test and the Kennett, the one running by Stockbridge, the other by Hungerford.
I began these descriptions by saying that Oxney Colne would, of all places, be the best spot from which a tourist could visit those parts of Devonshire, but for the fact that he could obtain there none of the accommodation which tourists require. A brother antiquarian might, perhaps, in those days have done so, seeing that there was, as I have said, a spare bedroom at the parsonage.
But for this purpose the place of rendezvous must be made attractive. We must have head-quarters as pleasant as the devil’s. I hope all of you have read the article in Guthrie’s Sunday Magazine for January, 1866, entitled “The house that beats the public house;” that splendid iron structure in Colne, Lancashire, built expressly for the irreligious working class.
Francis, who was at this time twenty-five years old, was accompanied by his elder brother, John, and his two younger brothers, Robert and Horace, and by many other friends; and it was a gay train that cantered down the valley of the Colne to Colchester. That ancient town was all astir.
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