“For finding a horse,” was the reply.
“But surely they would never jug you for finding a horse?”
“Well, but you see I found this one before his owner had lost him.”
Anselo admitted that this sort of thing was not at all uncommon in the old days, and two of his uncles had to take a trip across the water for similar practices.
When I left my friends and hastened to catch my train, the pleasure fair was in full blast, noisy organs, cymbals and drums, shrieking whistles, and the dull muffled roar of innumerable human voices, sounds which long haunted my ears, and, looking back from the moving train, there still floated from the distance the din and rattle of the receding fair.
CHAPTER XI
A FORGOTTEN HIGHWAY—“ON THE ROAD” WITH JONATHAN—THE PATRIN—THE GHOST OF THE HAYSTACK
“We was all brought up on this Old Dyke. We’s hatsh’d (camped) on it in all weathers. I knows every yard of it. Ay, the fine kanengrê (hares) we’s taken from these here fields.”
The speaker was my old friend, Jonathan Boswell, who with his tilt-cart had overtaken me whilst strolling along the grass-grown Roman Ermine Street which traverses the broad Heath stretching southward of Lincoln. At the Gypsy’s cheery invitation, I joined him on his seat under the overarching tilt. Behind us were the diminishing towers of the old city, and right on ahead the chariot-way of the Imperial legions ran, straight as an arrow along the Heath. Not a wild expanse, mind you, like your Yorkshire moorland with its wimpling burns and leagues of heather, though I daresay our Heath, now so admirably tilled, was savage enough in the days when “the long, lone, level line of the well-kept warpath, marked at intervals with high stones or posts as a guiding-line in fog or snow, stretched through a solitude but rarely broken, except by the footfall of the legionaries and the plaint of the golden plover sounding sweet from off the moorland.” Turf-covered from hedge to hedge for many a mile, the High Dyke, as the old road is now called, may well be described as a forgotten highway. Indeed, I have tramped along it mile on mile without meeting a soul, unless mayhap it was a sun-tanned drover slouching at the heels of half a dozen bullocks, or a village lad asleep in a hedge-bottom, with a soft-eyed motherly cow or two grazing not far away.
On this particular morning near the end of April, an unclouded sun lit up the verdant cornlands and larch spinneys. It shone upon the loins of the sturdy nag between the shafts. It touched into a brighter gold the gorse-bloom on the wayside bushes, and provoked the green-finches to fling their songs into the air from lichened palings and bramble sprays. Onward we journeyed, bumping and jolting over the uneven turfy road, and occasionally dodging the mounds of earth thrown up by the burrowing rabbits. What a picturesque figure my companion presented in his faded bottle-green coat adorned with large pearl buttons. His close-fitting dogskin cap imparted to his swarthy, sharply-cut features a not inappropriate poacher-like air, and I fancied the old man’s wrinkles had deepened on his brow since our last meeting, just after his wife’s death up in Yorkshire.
Sitting back under the hood, Jonathan here burst out with a pretty little reminiscence.