In the West Country

by Francis A. Knight

". . . shows the matin to be near.

And 'gins to pale his ineffectual fire."

Then the old sea-kings turn back to their rest, to lie till nightfall, each

"Arched over with a mound of grass,

Two handfuls of white dust shut in an urn of brass."

On a ledge of rock below the barrows, a pair of ravens build. Year after year their brood is reared in safety, beyond the reach even of the most venturesome of climbers. The old birds patrol the cliff for miles, like wandering spirits of two wreckers, condemned to haunt for ever the scene of their ill deeds. Here they come now, sailing slowly along on their broad wings, the sunshine glancing on their glossy plumage. They go sweeping by, uttering at times a crooning sound, not a croak at all, a soft, low note, with no touch of harshness in it. Gracefully they wheel and soar and glide, now turning over in the air, now poising like a pair of kestrels. Below them, crouching on the hot sand of the beach that skirts the bases of the cliff, a flock of gulls are resting, like heaps of foam left stranded by the tide. They do not shrink as the dark figures pass over. There are no eggs to plunder from the rocks; no young broods to harry; and a full-grown herring gull will show fight even to a raven.

It is a noble wall of cliff that guards this sandy fringe of the Atlantic; now light, now dark; here bare and weathered and windswept, there overgrown with sea-pink and samphire; and here again worn into deep clefts and cavernous hollows, which, when this old gun was new, were thorns in the side of the Preventive men. No shore in England has seen more smuggling than this. Many a contraband cargo has been landed at the little village at the head of the creek. It is whispered that more than one family of standing here owes its rise to well-planned "runs" of silk and spirits and tobacco. In the side of the Witan Stone—a grey old Menhir that was old in Roman times—there is still pointed out a hole called the "Gauger's Pocket," into which a bag of gold was dropped when a "run" was coming off, with due notice to the exciseman to go and look for it, and then to keep well in the background. It was quite an open ceremony. "Please, sir," a smuggler would say to the officer, "please, sir, your pocket's unbuttoned." "Aye, aye," was the answer, "but I shan't lose my money for all that."

Those days are not so long ago. It is not really many years since the clergyman who tells that story entered on that cure in the West Country which, to use his own words "was a mixed multitude of smugglers, wreckers, and dissenters," who still held that to shoot the gauger was not only a venial but a meritorious deed. When a man was hanged for murdering one of those hated representatives of law and order, his death was regarded as a piece of flagrant injustice, a crime in the eyes of Heaven itself; the very grass, it was triumphantly pointed out, refusing to grow upon his grave.

Those were days when the prosperity of a sea-board farm depended less on its scanty grazing and its sterile corn-land than on its ill-gotten harvest of the sea. They were all in it. Even a parson has been known to hold the lantern while the spirit kegs were hauled safely through the surf. And once, when a wreck came ashore in church time, and the congregation had with one accord rushed out of doors, the vicar stopped them on their way to the sea. "Brethren," he shouted, "I have but five words more to say." Then walking deliberately to the front, and taking off his surplice, he said: "Now, let us start fair."

This is a terrible coast. There are villages where half the gardens are decorated with figure-heads of lost ships, where the churchyards are strewn with sorrowful memorials of men, known or nameless, whose lifeless bodies have been given up by the sea. It is not long since corpses that were washed ashore were buried with scant ceremony just above high-water mark. But of recent years these wasted relics of mortality have been treated with more reverence, and in some villages it has become a custom to use figure-heads of wrecked vessels as memorials of the dead. In one place the white effigy of an armed warrior guards the grave of thirteen sailors, whose bodies the sea had laid upon the shore. In another graveyard the stern of a ship's boat has been set up over the remains of ten seamen "who were drifted on shore in a boat, frozen to death, at Beacon Cove, in this parish," one Sunday in December, now nearly fifty years ago. The rock-bound coast is as perilous as ever, but the days have gone when the shipwrecked mariner was dashed ashore alive only to meet his death from enemies more relentless than the waves. It was the height of rashness in the good old wrecking times to rescue a drowning man:—