Thirty years of wandering under the stars had matured the philosopher within him.
“Mine’s a wisht kind of a life, mine es; but so long as health and strength do laast ’tes grand to traapse the moors and circumvent the varmints. I know evra inch o’ thes eere country, evra patch o’ fuzze, and evra pile o’ rocks, and the stars be moore to me nor to moast folks. The eearth es beetiful, ’tes a pity to laave et, and when we do wheere do we go to? The ways o’ the birds, the enstincts of evra wild crittur, the min’rals I’ve blasted in the bal under the saa, the dimants up theere, tell me plain enuf theere’s a Maister-hand behind et all. All of ee say theere’s a God, but why are ee quiate as the grave about the Better Land?”
The distant stars glittered in the silent vault, the wind was heedless as the moor it swept, and there was no answer in the far-off mystic murmur of the sea.
His sinewy strides soon brought him to the edge of the cliff. Two hundred feet below, the Atlantic lashed the rocks and raged in the caverns.
“Well, auld Ocean, I can hear ee ef I caan’t see ee. Hope theest heaved up no dead thes tide. Lor’, how the gools do scraame, to be sure! but ’tes moosic and ’tes company to thet scraach on the moor”; and he shuddered at the thought. Half trusting to the tussocks of coarse grass but with muscles all alert he clambered down the steep zigzag his own feet had traced, towards the adit of Wheal Stanny situate near the line of the foam. Shrinking from the seething waters below he crept along a narrow ledge and with scanty foothold reached the mouth of the adit, where he brushed the sweat and salt spray from his face.
Then on hands and knees, his finger-marks effacing the footprints of marauding fox, he entered the narrowing chasm and stopped the hole as best he could, with pieces of quartz.
Drippings from the moist roof—retreat of trembling fern—blurred the lantern’s light and dimmed the sparkle of the crystals.
Leaving the cliffs he made for the uplands, for a few earths lay in the gullies that seamed them, and here and there a disused mine-work offered a safe retreat to fox and badger. Carefully the Earthstopper picked his way in the murky hollows, the lantern’s light awaking the frown of the granite and falling bright on the gold of the bracken that fringed the treacherous shaft. On the weird countryside above, the array of boulders loomed like phantoms in the sombre heather.
Threading in and out among them as he rose and sank with the undulating surface, the Earthstopper might have been a spy stealing from camp to camp of spectral hosts bivouacking on the dusky slopes.
On the furthest ridge he stood peering into the darkness that shrouded a moor over which he must pass. The level expanse might have seemed to invite him as smooth water invites a swimmer wearied by the waves, but superstitious fear held him there irresolute. For an eerie legend clung to the heart of the moor. Crofters would draw closely round their bright furze-fires as they listened to the harrowing tale. Little wonder that the old man paused in his forward path, for the last earth on his round was near a cairn that partly screened a haunted pool, and the moor compassed it round.