I commenced my sport at once, while Claude wandered up the glen to sketch a knoll of crags, on which a half-wild moorland pony, the only living thing in sight, stood staring and snuffing at the intruder, his long mane and tail streaming out wildly against the sky.
I had fished on for some hour or two; Claude had long since disappeared among the hills; I fancied myself miles from any human being, when a voice at my elbow startled me:—
‘A bleak place for fishing this, sir!’
I turned; it was an old grey-whiskered labouring man, with pick and spade on shoulder, who had crept on me unawares beneath the wall of the neighbouring deer-cover. Keen honest eyes gleamed out from his brown, scarred, weather-beaten face; and as he settled himself against a rock with the deliberate intention of a chat, I commenced by asking after the landlord of those parts, well known and honoured both by sportsman and by farmer.
‘He was gone to Malta—a warmer place that than Exmoor.’
‘What! have you been in Malta?’
Yes, he had been in Malta, and in stranger places yet. He had been a sailor: he had seen the landing in Egypt, and heard the French cannon thundering vainly from the sand-hills on the English boats. He had himself helped to lift Abercrombie up the ship’s side to the death-bed of the brave. He had seen Caraccioli hanging at his own yard-arm, and heard (so he said, I know not how correctly) Lady Hamilton order out the barge herself, and row round the frigate of the murdered man, to glut her eyes with her revenge. He had seen, too, the ghastly corpse floating upright, when Nelson and the enchantress met their victim, returned from the sea-depths to stare at them, as Banquo’s ghost upon Macbeth. But she was ‘a mortal fine woman, was Lady Hamilton, though she was a queer one, and cruel kind to the sailors; and many a man she saved from flogging; and one from hanging, too; that was a marine that got a-stealing; for Nelson, though he was kind enough, yet it was a word and a blow with him; and quite right he, sir; for there be such rascals on board ship, that if you ain’t as sharp with them as with wild beastesses, no man’s life, nor the ship’s neither, would be worth a day’s purchase.’
So he, with his simple straightforward notions of right and wrong worth, much maudlin unmerciful indulgence which we hear in these days: and yet not going to the bottom of the matter either, as we shall see in the next war. But, rambling on, he told me how he had come home, war-worn and crippled, to marry a wife and get tall sons, and lay his bones in his native village; till which time (for death to the aged poor man is a Sabbath, of which he talks freely, calmly, even joyously) ‘he just got his bread, by the squire’s kindness, patching and mending at the stone deer-fences.’
I gave him something to buy tobacco, and watched him as he crawled away, with a sort of stunned surprise. And he had actually seen Nelson sit by Lady Hamilton! It was so strange, to have that gay Italian bay, with all its memories,—the orgies of Baiæ, and the unburied wrecks of ancient towns, with the smoking crater far above; and the world-famous Nile-mouths and those great old wars, big with the destinies of the world; and those great old heroes, with their awful deeds for good and evil, all brought so suddenly and livingly before me, up there in the desolate moorland, where the deer, and birds, and heath, and rushes were even as they had been from the beginning. Like Wordsworth with his Leech-Gatherer (a poem which I, in spite of laughter, must rank among his very highest),—
‘While he was talking thus, the lonely place,
The old man’s shape, and speech—all troubled me;
In my mind’s eye I seemed to see him pace
About the weary moors continually,
Wandering about alone and silently.
. . . and when he ended,
I could have laughed myself to scorn to find
In that decrepit man so firm a mind.’