"So gentlemen like you've told me afore; but what I says is, dey both comes from Italy, don't dey? Well den, it stands to reason dey're the same. No people what goes about the country playing hurdy-gurdies ever made this roäd, I'll stake me life on't."
If Hogben had no respect for foreigners, his manner indicated that he owned an awed kind of deference to the memory of Lord Rokeby of Mount Morris, past which park he had driven on his way to and from Canterbury for many years. Which of the several Barons Rokeby it was whose doings in lifetime and whose post-mortem pranks were the theme of his discourses, does not appear. "He had a goolden bart" (he meant "bath") "for Sundays and a marble one for week-days, and he'd sit in 'em all de marciful day long and read de papers and have his bit o' grub. When he got tired o' dat, and t'ought he'd like a stroll, he'd just nip outer de bart and walk about de park, as naked as Adam before dey inwented fig-leaves. An' now" (? cause and effect) "he drives down de Stone Street every midnight, wid his head in his lap and four coal-black haases, breading fire. No, I can't say I ever seed him—and dunnosiwanto: reckon I'd run awaiy. I knewed a man what did see 'im, and it gran' nigh druv 'im off n 'is 'ed."
Such are the legends still current at the Back of Beyond, but they are dwindling away. Even old Hogben could find it possible to say that "ghostesses" were already "quite out-o'-doors"—by which he meant that they were out of fashion. But he was bung-full of smuggling lore, and could illustrate his stories with object lessons, as he drove his steady course along the Stone Street. "'See dat tree," he would say, in passing a copse. "Dat's where de Ransleys"—naming a ferocious family of smugglers, men and women, notorious for their cruelties and outrages—"dat's where de Ransleys tied one of deir haases, before dey were taken off to Maidstone Gaol." The horse was starved to death, thus haltered, and the gang, who had been known to beat a Revenue officer to death, were almost heart-broken when they heard of it. Such contradictions are we all.
[CHAPTER XIII]
THE BACK OF BEYOND (continued)
If we continued along this straight road, the Mecca of the Stone Street carriers, Canterbury, would be reached again. Instead, we turn to the right, and in a mile and a half reach the Elham Valley and the hoary village of Lyminge, looking very new when viewed from a little distance, by reason of the sudden eruption of red-roofed villas come to disturb the ancient seclusion. Have a care how you pronounce the name of this village, lest by some uncovenanted rendering you proclaim yourself a stranger. The cautious in these matters always accost the first inhabitant met with, and ask him the name of the place, a method never known to fail unless the encounter takes place outside the post-office and the inhabitant be a crusty one who, curtly, and with an over-the-shoulder jerk of the thumb, says, "You'll find it written up there."
LYMINGE.