“Now, it’s your turn, sister. Let’s have that tale about Old Ruzlam Boz’ll’s boy.”
Without stopping for a moment to think, Sibby began to reel off what was evidently a well-known and favourite story, punctuating her sentences by picking from her gown and flinging at me sundry prickly balls of burdock seed, telling of what prowlings in the woods!
“It’s donkey’s ears (i.e. long years) since Ruzlam Boz’ll’s wife had a baby boy born’d in a tent near a spring what bubbled out betwixt two rocks, and every summer they used to besh (rest) by the same spring. By and by, when the dear little boy grew big enough, his mammy sent him every morning to fill the kettle. But one day he got a surprise. There on the grass by the spring what should he see but a new silver shilling. Of course he picked it up and put it into his pocket, and never said nothing about it when he got back to the tent. Next morning he found double the money at the spring-head, and so it went on until his pockets were chinking full of silver, and for all that he never breathed no word about his luck. But one day Old Ruzlam heard the boy rattling the money in his pockets, and forced him to tell where he got it from. Next morning the daddy went off, laughing to hisself and thinking of the nice heap of silver he was going to pick up, but after he had looked up and down and all over, he found just nothing at all, leastways he saw no money; but as he stood scratting his head, puzzled-like, there, on one side of the spring, he saw a dear little teeny old man, and on the other side a dear little teeny old woman, and, saying never a word, they stooped down and flung water right into Ruzlam’s eyes. So away he ran home, and there, if he didn’t find his boy had gone cross-eyed. What’s more, he never came right agen.”
Thus, by pleasant steps amid scenes not lacking in glamour, I advanced little by little in my knowledge of these fascinating straylings with whom no stranger ever yet found it easy to mingle as one of themselves.
CHAPTER II
CHARACTERS OF THE COURT—READING BORROW
A FEW miles outside my native city, there stands on the bank of the Roman Fossdyke a lonely house known as “Drinsey Nook,” formerly a tavern with bowling greens, swings, and skittle alleys, a resort of wagonette and boating parties out for a frolic in the sunshine. Often on bygone summer eves have I loitered about the old inn gleaming white amid its guardian trees, but best of all I loved to see the beechen boughs drop their fiery leaves upon its mossy roof in the fading of the year.
To-day, as of yore, the brown-sailed barges, laden with grain or scented fir-planks, glide lazily past the place, and a motor-boat will at times go racing by, to the alarm of the waterhens which had almost come to look on the sleepy canal as their own.
Does it ever dream of its gay past, I wonder—this old forgotten house fronting upon the rush-fringed waterway?
One golden October morning, my father, who had a passion for boating on our local waters, hired a small sailing craft, and, the breezes aiding us, we were wafted along the Fossdyke as far as the said riparian house of call. Hour after hour we wandered in the beech woods stretching behind the inn, resting now on some protruding snag or fallen bole to watch the squirrels at play, and again pushing our way breast-high through sheets of changing bracken to the hazel thickets where the nuts hung in clusters well within reach of our hooked sticks.
Linked with this ramble in the time of the falling leaves is an impression I have never forgotten. “Look,” said my father, pointing to a decayed stump of a post almost buried amid dank moss, “this is all that remains of Tom Otter’s gibbet-tree.” I shuddered as he told how in other days he had heard the chains clanking in the wind, and he went on to relate that his father was among the crowd of citizens who, starting from Lincoln Castle one March morning in the year 1806, followed the murderer’s corpse until it was hanged in irons on a post thirty feet high on Saxilby Moor. For several days after the event, the vicinity of the gibbet resembled a country fair with drinking booths, ballad singers, Gypsy fiddlers, and fortune-tellers.