“Ban’t no use flustering yourself, my old dear. Every human man’s got one kick in him. An’ kick I’m gwaine to this instant moment.”
He turned and left her with great agility, while she—the foundations of her married life suddenly shaken by this earthquake—stood and stared and gasped up at heaven.
Joseph quickly vanished into the dusk, and soon stood once more before the new vicar. Mr. Budd thereupon raised his eyes from his desk and asked a question without words.
“Well, your honour, ’tis like this here: I’ll go back to church again very next Sunday as falls in.”
“Ah! But I thought that Joseph would be in bondage to no man?”
“Nor no woman neither,” said Mr. Hannaford.
A TRAVELLER’S TALE
“He’m a monkey that hath seen the world, no doubt,” said Merryweather Chugg, the water-bailiff.
“Yes—an’ brought back some nuts wi’ gold kernels, by all accounts,” answered Noah Sage; “though he ban’t going to crack none here, I reckon, for the chap’s only come to have a look at the home of his youth; then he’m off again to foreign parts.”
The two old men sat in the parlour of the “Bellaford” Inn at Postbridge, and about them gathered other labouring folk. All were inhabitants of the Dartmoor district, and most had been born and bred in the valley of East Dart or upon adjacent farms. This village, of which the pride and glory is an old bridge that spans the river, shall be found upon the shaggy breast of the Moor, like an oasis in the desert; for here much land has been snatched from the hungry heath, groves of beech and sycamore lie in the bosom of these undulating wastes, and close at hand are certain snug tenement farms whereon men have dwelt and wrestled with the wild land from time immemorial.