“Beryan erde
Oyn und perde!”
THE GAUGER’S POCKET[35]
Poor old Tristram Pentire! How he comes up before me as I pronounce his name! That light, active, half-stooping form, bent as though he had a brace of kegs upon his shoulders still; those thin, grey, rusty locks that fell upon a forehead seamed with the wrinkles of threescore years and five; the cunning glance that questioned in his eye, and that nose carried always at half-cock, with a red blaze along its ridge, scorched by the departing footstep of the fierce fiend Alcohol, when he fled before the reinforcements of the coast-guard.
He was the last of the smugglers; and when I took possession of my glebe, I hired him as my servant-of-all-work, or rather no-work, about the house, and there he rollicked away the last few years of his careless existence, in all the pomp and idleness of “The parson’s man.” He had taken a bold part in every landing on the coast, man and boy, full forty years; throughout which time all kinds of men had largely trusted him with their brandy and their lives, and true and faithful had he been to them, as sheath to steel.
Gradually he grew attached to me, and I could but take an interest in him. I endeavoured to work some softening change in him, and to awaken a certain sense of the errors of his former life. Sometimes, as a sort of condescension on his part, he brought himself to concede and to acknowledge, in his own quaint, rambling way—
“Well, sir, I do think, when I come to look back, and to consider what lives we used to live,—drunk all night and idle abed all day, cursing, swearing, fighting, gambling, lying, and always prepared to shet [shoot] the gauger,—I do really believe, sir, we surely was in sin!”
But, whatever contrite admissions to this extent were extorted from old Tristram by misty glimpses of a moral sense and by his desire to gratify his master, there were two points on which he was inexorably firm. The one was, that it was a very guilty practice in the authorities to demand taxes for what he called run goods; and the other settled dogma of his creed was, that it never could be a sin to make away with an exciseman. Battles between Tristram and myself on these themes were frequent and fierce; but I am bound to confess that he always managed, somehow or other, to remain master of the field. Indeed, what Chancellor of the Exchequer could be prepared to encounter the triumphant demand with which Tristram smashed to atoms my suggestions of morality, political economy, and finance? He would listen with apparent patience to all my solemn and secular pleas for the revenue, and then down he came upon me with the unanswerable argument—
“But why should the king tax good liquor? If they must have taxes, why can’t they tax something else?”
My efforts, however, to soften and remove his doctrinal prejudice as to the unimportance, in a moral point of view, of putting the officers of his Majesty’s revenue to death, were equally unavailing. Indeed, to my infinite chagrin, I found that I had lowered myself exceedingly in his estimation by what he called standing up for the exciseman.