CHAPTER XLII
Gage of Suffolk—Fellow in a Turban—Town of Holyhead—Father Boots—An Expedition—Holyhead and Finisterræ—Gryffith ab Cynan—The Fairies’ Well.
Leaving the pier, I turned up a street to the south, and was not long before I arrived at a kind of market-place, where were carts and stalls, and on the ground, on cloths, apples and plums, and abundance of greengages—the latter, when good, decidedly the finest fruit in the world; a fruit, for the introduction of which into England, the English have to thank one Gage, of an ancient Suffolk family, at present extinct, after whose name the fruit derives the latter part of its appellation. Strolling about the market-place, I came in contact with a fellow dressed in a turban and dirty blue linen robes and trowsers. He bore a bundle of papers in his hand, one of which he offered to me. I asked him who he was.
“Arap,” he replied.
He had a dark, cunning, roguish countenance, with small eyes, and had all the appearance of a Jew. I spoke to him in what Arabic I could command on a sudden, and he jabbered to me in a corrupt dialect, giving me a confused account of a captivity which he had undergone amidst savage Mahometans. At last I asked him what religion he was of.
“The Christian,” he replied.
“Have you ever been of the Jewish?” said I.
He returned no answer save by a grin.
I took the paper, gave him a penny, and then walked away. The paper contained an account in English of how the bearer, the son of Christian parents, had been carried into captivity by two Mahometan merchants, father and son, from whom he had escaped with the greatest difficulty.
“Pretty fools,” said I, “must any people have been who ever stole you; but O what fools if they wished to keep you after they had got you!”