“A braave blaze,” he said, “a blaze as gives the thoughtful eye an’ nose a tidy guess at what the Pit’s like to be. Ess, indeed, a religious fire, so to say; an’ I warrant the prophet sat along just such another when he said man was born to trouble sure as the sparks fly up’ard.”
Somewhat earlier on the same night, under the northern ramparts of Dartmoor, and upon the long, creeping hill that rises aloft from Okehampton, then dips again, passes beneath the Belstones, and winds by Sticklepath and Zeal under Cosdon, there rattled a trap holding two men. From their conversation it appeared that one was a traveller who now returned southward from a journey.
“Gert, gay, fanciful doin’s to-night,” said the driver, looking aloft where Cosdon Beacon swelled. “You can see the light from the blaze up-long, an’ now an’ again you can note a sign in the night like a red-hot wire drawed up out the airth. They ’m sky-rockets, I judge.”
“’T is a joyful night, sure ’nough.”
The driver illustrated a political ignorance quite common in rural districts ten years ago and not conspicuously rare to-day. He laboured under uneasy suspicions that the support of monarchy was a direct and dismal tax upon the pockets of the poor.
“Pity all the fuss ban’t about a better job,” he said. “Wan auld, elderly lady ’s so gude as another, come to think of it. Why shouldn’t my mother have a jubilee?”
“What for? ’Cause she’ve borne a damned fule?” asked the other man angrily. “If that’s your way o’ thought, best keep it in your thoughts. Anyhow, I’ll knock your silly head off if I hears another word to that tune, so now you knaw.”
The speaker was above medium height and breadth, the man who drove him happened to be unusually small.
“Well, well, no offence,” said the latter.
“There is offence; an’ it I heard a lord o’ the land talk that way to-night, I’d make un swallow every dirty word of it. To hell wi’ your treason!”