Oh, Mr. Swales, you can t be serious. Surely these tombstones are not
all wrong?
Yabblins! There may be a poorish few not wrong, savin where they make
out the people too good; for there be folk that do think a balm-bowl be
like the sea, if only it be their own. The whole thing be only lies. Now
look you here; you come here a stranger, an you see this kirk-garth. I
nodded, for I thought it better to assent, though I did not quite
understand his dialect. I knew it had something to do with the church.
He went on: And you consate that all these steans be aboon folk that be
happed here, snod an snog? I assented again. Then that be just where
the lie comes in. Why, there be scores of these lay-beds that be toom as
old Dun s bacca-box on Friday night. He nudged one of his companions,
and they all laughed. And my gog! how could they be otherwise? Look at
that one, the aftest abaft the bier-bank: read it! I went over and
read:--
Edward Spencelagh, master mariner, murdered by pirates off the coast of
Andres, April, 1854, t. 30. When I came back Mr. Swales went on:--
Who brought him home, I wonder, to hap him here? Murdered off the coast
of Andres! an you consated his body lay under! Why, I could name ye a
dozen whose bones lie in the Greenland seas above --he pointed
northwards-- or where the currents may have drifted them. There be the
steans around ye. Ye can, with your young eyes, read the small-print of
the lies from here. This Braithwaite Lowrey--I knew his father, lost in
the _Lively_ off Greenland in 20; or Andrew Woodhouse, drowned in the
same seas in 1777; or John Paxton, drowned off Cape Farewell a year
later; or old John Rawlings, whose grandfather sailed with me, drowned
in the Gulf of Finland in 50. Do ye think that all these men will have
to make a rush to Whitby when the trumpet sounds? I have me antherums
aboot it! I tell ye that when they got here they d be jommlin an
jostlin one another that way that it ud be like a fight up on the ice
in the old days, when we d be at one another from daylight to dark, an
tryin to tie up our cuts by the light of the aurora borealis. This was
evidently local pleasantry, for the old man cackled over it, and his
cronies joined in with gusto.
But, I said, surely you are not quite correct, for you start on the
assumption that all the poor people, or their spirits, will have to
67