"But, my good friend, I am a soldier," replied Smeaton; "and, when I tell you that I have slept for a month together upon the bare ground, you will easily judge that one of your houses will be quite as good as a palace to me. All I want is shelter and concealment for a little time."
"That you shall have, sir," replied the other man, who was somewhat older; "and, as for concealment, we have got plenty of places where the devil himself would not find you. We sometimes let the custom-house people come and search just for the fun of the thing; and yet, somehow or another, we contrive to supply the whole country round with Bohea, which never paid toll to King or Queen either."
"From what I saw to-night," said Smeaton, "you must have horses amongst you also; and my two beasts are in some degree an embarrassment to me, unless I can stable them somewhere."
"You will have to stable them on the downs, sir," said the younger man; "for there are no such things as stables in Ale. But, stay a bit; I think I can manage it. Farmer Tupper will take them in, I dare say; he knows how to hold his tongue. As to horses for ourselves, Lord bless you, when we want them, which is not above once a-month, we borrow them of our neighbours. Many a good farmer, and gentleman too, finds his horses not fit for much work on the day after the new moon. But then, what does he care? Every now and then he finds a pound of tea for his wife, or a bundle of Flemish hosiery for himself, lying at his door or on his window-sill; and he thinks himself well paid for his horses' night-work. Here, my man--Master Higham--you get down and go with your master. I'll lead the horses across the down to Tupper's farm; but take off the bags first. Grayling, you had better take the gentleman to your house, for you have more room, and my wife had a babby yesterday morning; so there is a fine squalling. Bless its little heart! It has got a pipe like a boatswain's whistle."
Thus saying, he led away the horses, leaving his companion with the young nobleman and his servant, the latter of whom seemed, during his stay at Ale Manor, to have become very intimate with all the good fishermen of the village. Before walking on, however, Smeaton judged it better to take immediate precautions for guarding against surprise, and inquired whether a lad could not be hired to watch the road, and give early notice of the approach of any party of soldiers. The old fisherman, Grayling, laughed.
"Lord bless you sir, you don't know us," he said. "Don't you trouble yourself at all about it. No soldier or anything else comes within three miles of us without our knowing it. 'Tother night, when they came to the Manor, we were all ready for them if they had come on. You were ready for then, too, it seems, though how you got out of their way we do not know. I had a great mind to give the fellows who came down to the bay looking for you a drop of salt water to drink for poking their noses into Ale; and some of our men could scarcely be prevented from doing it, but it would only have made a noise; and so it was better let alone. However, you can rest quite as safe here as if you were a hundred miles out at sea. They shan't catch you in Ale, I'll answer for it. So come along, sir."
In a few minutes more, Smeaton and his servant were introduced into the fisherman's cottage, the lower story of which, consisting of a room on either side and a good wide passage between them, was encumbered with a variety of articles belonging to the man's craft or mystery, some of which were not of the most pleasant odour. Salted fish, sails, nets, fishing-lines, spars, oars, boat-hooks, barrels of tar, tallow candles, and a number of things which I cannot describe, were huddled together in the rooms and in the passage, exhaling a smell, as I have said, more powerful than fragrant, which was considerably assisted by a quantity of smoke issuing forth from the room on the left-hand side. There, at the cheek of the fire; as they termed it, sat the old man's old wife, with two or three young dolphins; her grand-children, playing about as merrily as if it had been noon. To her the fisherman introduced his guest, and whispered a word in her ear which instantly made her clamber up a steep little staircase which came down without guard or balustrade, not into the passage, but into the middle of the very room where she had been sitting. The floor above, I may mention, contained four rooms, and was nearly double the size of the floor below, which is only to be accounted for by the fact of the house being built against the steep side of the hill, which left not more than eight-and-twenty feet of flat ground between its base and the river.
The good lady not returning immediately, the fisherman himself went up after her, and found her, like all ladies when visited by an unexpected guest, in a great and setting-to-rights bustle.
"Pooh, pooh!" said the old man; "don't make such a piece of work, mother. He is quite a plain gentleman, and has been a soldier. He must have the back room too; for there he'll be snuggest."
"But suppose you want to get the tea out, Jack?" said the old lady. "Why, the bed is just over the hiding-hole."