The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales

by Arthur Quiller-Couch

This was too much. "You mean, sneakin', snivellin', pilferin', egg-stealin' highwayman!" cries she, and lets fly.

Well, sir, the sugar basin was scat to atoms, but the teapot, as you see, didn' suffer more than a chip. The wonder was, she stayed her hand at the second stroke, old Jacka being in no position to defend himself or explain. In later days when she invited her friends to tea, she used to put it down to instinct. "Something warned me," she'd say. But that's how the teapot came into our family.

KING O' PRUSSIA.

REPORTED TALE OF A SMUGGLER, A REVENUE CUTTER, AND AN OFFICIOUS MINISTER.

You have heard tell, of course, of Captain John Carter, the famous smuggler of Prussia Cove, and his brothers Harry, Francis, and Charles, and Captain Will Richards, "Tummels," Carpenter Hosking, Uncle Billy, and the rest of the Cove boys; likewise of old Nan Leggo and Bessie Bussow that kept the Kiddlywink[1] there? Well, well, I see our youngsters going to school nowadays with their hair brushed, and I hear them singing away inside the classroom for all the world as if they were glad to grow up and pay taxes; and it makes me wonder if they can be the children of that old-fangled race. Sometimes I think it's high time for me to go. There was a newspaper fellow down here when the General Walker came ashore, and, after asking a lot of questions, he put the case in a nutshell. "You're a link with the past," he said; "that's what you are." I don't know if he invented the expression, or if he picked it up somewhere and used it on me, but it's a terrible clever one.

You mustn't think I'm boasting. I never knew Captain John; he died in the year 'seven, and I wasn't born for twelve months after. But I've shaken hands with Captain Harry—the one who was taken prisoner by the French, and came near to losing his head. He spent his latter years farming at Rinsey and local preaching; a very earnest man. He gave me my first-class ticket—that was in the late twenties, and not long before his death. And Captain Will Richards I knew well; he took over the business after Captain John, and lasted down to the Crimea year. I carried the coffin; eighty-five his age was, according to the plate on it; but, of course, the business had come to an end long before.

Everybody calls it Prussia Cove in these days. The visitors ask for Prussia Cove, and go and crane their heads over. You know the place?— just east of Cuddan Point. It's three coves really; Pisky's Cove, Bessie's Cove, and Prussia. The first has no good landing, but plenty of good caves; east of that comes Bessie's, where the Kiddlywink stood, with a harbour cut in the solid rock, and a roadway, and more caves; and east of that, with a point and a small island dividing them, comes Prussia, where John Carter had his house. Before his time it was called Porthleah, but he got the nickname "King o' Prussia" as a boy, and it stuck to him, and now it sticks to the old place. The visitors crane their heads over (for you must do that to count the vessels in the harbour right underneath you), and ask foolish questions, and get answered with a pack of lies. There's an old tale for one, about a fellow who heard that the real King of Prussia had been defeated by Napoleon Bonaparte. "Ah," says he, "I'm sorry for that man. Misfortunes never come single; not more'n six weeks ago he lost three hundred keg of brandy, by information, so I'm told." All nonsense! Porthleah never lost but one keg in all John Carter's time, and that was a leaky one in a pool at Pisky's which the custom-house fellows sniffed as they went by. To be sure, one day when the King was away from home, the collector came round from Penzance, seized a cargo, and carried it off to the Custom House store. What did Carter do when he came home and heard about it? He had agreed to deliver the goods by a certain day, his character for honest business was at stake and he wasn't going to disappoint his customers. So he rode into Penzance that night, broke open the Custom House store, and rode back with all his kegs; nothing else, mind you. When the officers next morning discovered what had happened, they allowed at once this was Carter's work, because he was an honest man and wouldn't take anything that didn't belong to him.

But the tale they tell oftenest is about the battery he kept on Enys Point, and how he opened fire with it upon His Majesty's vessel; and I want you to have the rights of that as I had it from Captain Will Richards himself. To hear folks speak you would think the King just opened fire and blazed away for the fun of it; whereas, with all his daring, he was the quietest, most inoffensive man in the trade, if only you let him alone. Mr. Wearne, the collector, understood this, and it was not by his fault either that the firing came about, but all through an interfering woman and a preacher who couldn't mind his own business.

It began in this way. Bessie Bussow had a sister-in-law married and living over here in Ardevora—Ann Geen was the name of her—a daughter of Kitty Lemal. (You've heard tell of Kitty Lemal and her eight daughters, and her stocking full of guineas? No? Well there's another story for you one of these days.) This Ann was the youngest of the eight, and married John Geen latish in life, just in time to bring him a boy before he left her a widow; and after her mother Kitty died she and the boy lived together in the old house at Carne Glaze—Ugnes House[2] they used to call it. The boy, being the son of old parents, was a lean, scrag-necked child, with a lollopping big head, too clever for his years. He had the Lemals' pluck inside him though, for all his unhandy looks; and, of course, his mother thought him a nonesuch.

Well, with all the country talking about John Carter and his doings, you may fancy that every boy in Ardevora wanted to grow up in a hurry and be off to Prussia Cove a-smuggling. It took young Phoby Geen (his real name was Deiphobus) as bad as the rest. He had been over to the Cove with his mother on a visit to Bessie Bussow, and there in the Kiddlywink the King had patted him on his big head and given him a shilling. After that the boy gave his mother no peace. She, poor soul, wanted to make a preacher of him, and wouldn't hear of his going; but often, after he had turned fifteen, she would be out of bed ten times of a night and listening at his door to make sure he hadn't run off in the dark.