The evidence he gave was to the effect that, during the firing, he went down into the cabin of the Lottery, and there saw Potter with a gun. Potter said “Damn them! I have just done for one of them.”
Potter was convicted and hanged. Toms, of course, never dared to again return to Polperro, and was given a small post as under-turnkey at Newgate, where he lived the remainder of his life.
Talland, midway between Polperro and Looe, was a favourite spot with these daring Polperro fellows. It offered better opportunities than those given by Polperro itself for unobserved landings; for it was—and it still is—a weird, lonely place, overhanging the sea, with a solitary ancient church well within sound of the waves that beat heavily upon the little sands. It was an easy matter to store kegs in the churchyard itself, and to take them inland, or into Polperro by the country roads, when opportunity offered, hidden in carts taking seaweed for manure to the fields.
At one time Talland owned a shuddery reputation in all this country-side, and people in the farmhouses told, with many a fearful glance over their shoulders, of the uncanny creatures that nightly haunted the churchyard. Devils, wraiths, and fearful apparitions made the spot a kind of satanic parliament; and we may be amply sure that these horrid stories lost no accent or detail of terror by constant repetition in those inglenooks on winter evenings. This is not to say that other places round about were innocent of things supernatural; for those were times when every Cornish glen, moor, stream, and hill had their bukkadhus, their piskies, and gnomes of sorts, good and evil; but the infernal company that consorted together in Talland churchyard was entirely beside these old-established creatures. They were hors concours, as the French would say: they formed a class by themselves; and, in the expressive slang of to-day, they were “the Limit,” the ne plus ultra of militant ghostdom. People rash enough to take the church-path through Talland after night had fallen were sure to hear and see strange semi-luminous figures; and they bethought them then of the at once evil and beneficent reputation owned and really enjoyed by Parson Dodge, the eccentric clergyman of Talland, who was reputed an exorcist of the first quality. He it was who, doughty wrestler with the most obstinate spectres, found himself greatly in demand in a wide geographical area for the banishing of troublesome ghosts for a long term of years to the Red Sea; but it was whispered, on the other hand, that he kept a numerous band of diabolic familiars believed by the simple folk of that age to resort nightly to the vicarage for their orders, and then to do his bidding. These were the spiteful creatures, thought the country people, who, to revenge themselves for this servitude, lurked in the churchyard, and got even with mankind by pinching and smacking and playing all manner of scurvy tricks upon those who dared pass this way under cover of night. Uncle Zack Chowne even got a black eye by favour of these inimical agencies, one exceptionally dark night when, coming home-along this way, under the influence of spirits not of supernatural origin, he met a posse of fiends, and, in the amiable manner of the completely intoxicated, insisted upon their adjourning with him to the nearest inn, “jush for shake of ole timesh.” In fact, he made the sad mistake of taking the fiends in question for friends, and addressed them by name: with the result that he got a sledge-hammer blow in what the prize-fighting brotherhood used to call “the peeper.”
If he had adopted the proper method to be observed when meeting spirits, i.e. if he had stood up and “said his Nummy Dummy,” all would doubtless have been well; this form of exorcism being in Cornwall of great repute and never known to fail: being nothing less, indeed, than the Latin In Nomine Domine in disguise.
But the real truth of the matter, as the readers of these lines who can see further through a brick wall than others may readily perceive, was that those savage spooks and mischievous, Puck-like shapes, were really youthful local smugglers in disguise, engaged at one and the same time in a highly profitable nocturnal business, and in taking the welcome opportunity thus offered in an otherwise dull circle of establishing a glorious “rag.”
Parson Dodge himself was something more than suspected of being “ower sib” to these at once commercial and rollicking dogs, and Talland was in fact the scene of many a successful run that could scarce have been successful had not this easy-going cleric amiably permitted.
It is thus peculiarly appropriate that we find to-day in this lonely churchyard an epitaph upon a smuggler of those times. It is a tragical enough epitaph, its tragedy perhaps disguised at the first glance by the grotesquely comic little cherubs carved upon the tombstone, and representing the local high-water mark of mortuary sculpture a hundred years or so ago. They are pursy cherubs, of oleaginous appearance and of this-worldly, rather than of other-worldly paunch and deportment. In general, Talland churchyard is rich in such carvings; death’s-heads of appalling ugliness to be seen in company with middle-aged, double-chinned angels wearing what look suspiciously like chest-protectors and pyjamas, and they decorate, with weirdly humorous aspect, the monuments and ledger stones, and grin familiarly from the pavement with the half-obliterated grins of many generations back. One of them points with a claw, intended for a hand, to an object somewhat resembling a crumpled dress-tie set up on end, probably designed to represent an hour-glass.
Such is the mortuary art of these lonesome parishes in far Cornwall: naïve, uninstructed, home-made. It sufficed the simple folk for whom it was wrought; and now that more conventional and pretentious memorials have taken its place, to serve the turn of folk less simple, there are those who would abolish its uncouth manifestations. But that way—with the urbanities of the world—goes old Cornwall, never to be replaced.