"The brightest thing on Cornish land
Is the face of Miss Mary Mundy."
Recrossing Pradenack down in the dim light of a newly-risen moon, everything looked so solitary and ghostly that we started to see moving from behind a furz-bush, a mysterious figure, which crossed the road slowly, and stood waiting for us. Was it man or ghost, or—
Only a donkey! A ridiculous grey donkey. It might have been Tregeagle himself—Tregeagle, the grim mad-demon of Cornish tradition, once a dishonest steward, who sold his soul to the devil, and is doomed to keep on emptying Dozmare Pool, near St. Neots (the same mere wherein Excalibur was thrown), with a limpet-shell; and to spend his nights in other secluded places balancing interminable accounts, which are always just sixpence wrong.
Poor Tregeagle! I fear some of us, weak in arithmetic, had a secret sympathy for him! But we never met him—nor anything worse than that spectral donkey, looming large and placid against the level horizon.
Soon, "the stars came out by twos and threes,"—promising a fine night and finer morning, during which, while we were comfortably asleep, our good horse and man would be driving across this lonely region to Falmouth, in time to take the good people to church on Sunday morning.
"And we'll do it, too—don't you be anxious about us, ladies," insisted Charles. "I'll feed him well, and groom him well. I likes to take care of a good horse, and you'll see, he'll take no harm. I'll be back when you want me, at the week's end, or perhaps before then, with some party or other—we're always coming to the Lizard—and I'll just look in and see how you're getting on, and how you liked Kynance. But take care of the tide."
We thanked our kindly charioteer, bade him and his horse good-bye, wished him a pleasant journey through the moonlight, which was every minute growing more beautiful, then went indoors to supper—no! supper would have been an insult to Mary Mundy's tea—to bed.