As he seemed so certain, a messenger was sent to Drury House, who brought back the news that he had found Mrs Donne ill in bed, after the birth of a dead infant—an event which had happened on the very day and hour that her husband had seen the vision.
[12] In chapter iii. of Lorna Doone, Blackmore speaks of Dulverton as a town near which “the Exe and his big brother Barle have union.”
[13] A Dulverton farmer once remarked to me on the great size of Exmoor farmhouses, saying that it would be possible to put into one of them two or three average homesteads.
[14] According to one writer, that mighty hunter, Katerfelto, earned huge glory both for himself and for his owner, a lusty farmer, by taking the bit between his teeth on the Barkham Hills, and carrying him bodily over a twenty-foot gap in an old Roman iron-mine.
[15] The original of “Red Rube” in Melville’s Katerfelto.
[16] Subject to variation, e.g., “children.”
[17] Lorna Doone, chapters ix., xlviii.
[18] Blackmore refers to the subject in Lorna Doone, chapter xxxix. Speaking of Jeremy Stickles, he says that “his duty was first and most ostensibly to see to the levying of poundage in the little haven of Lynmouth and further up the coast, which was now becoming a place of resort for the folk whom we call smugglers, that is to say, who land their goods without regard to the King’s revenue, as by law established. And indeed there had been no officer appointed to take toll, until one had been sent to Minehead, not so very long before” (see also Lorna Doone, chapter xii.).
[19] These worthies are coupled by Blackmore in the Maid of Sker (chapter lxviii.). “Since Tom Faggus died, there has not been such a man to be found, nowhere round these parts.”