"No legend, sir—no legend. Where be the tombstones of drownded mariners to prove it such? Not one to forty that they has in other sea-board parishes. For why? Dunstan bell sounds its warning, and not a craft will put out."
"There is the storm cone," I suggested.
He did not hear me. He was punching with his staff at one of a number of little green mounds that lay about us.
"I could tell you a story of these," he said. "Do you know where we stand?"
"On the site of the old churchyard?"
"Ay, sir; though it still bore the name of the new yard in my first memory of it."
"Is that so? And what is the story?"
He dwelt a minute, dense with introspection. Suddenly he sat himself down upon a mossy bulge in the turf, and waved me imperiously to a place beside him.
"The old order changeth," he said. "The only lasting foundations of men's works shall be godliness and law-biding. Long ago they builded a new church—here, high up on the cliffs, where the waters could not reach; and, lo! the waters wrought beneath and sapped the foundations, and the church fell into the sea."
"So I understand," I said.