| Captens. | ||
| s. | d. | |
| T for 2 | 0 | 6 |
| Sleep for 2 | 1 | 0 |
| Meat and Taties and Bier | 1 | 6 |
| Bresks | 1 | 6 |
Four shillings and sixpence for bed and board for two wolfish appetites for a night and a day, to say nothing of the pantomime performed gratuitously for our behoof, at a very early hour, by Boscastle amateurs! Good day, Mrs. Treworgy! good day! “To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new.”
HOLACOMBE
There is a small outlying hamlet[138] in my parochial charge, about two miles from my vicarage, with a population of about two hundred souls, inhabiting a kind of plateau shut in by lofty hills and skirted by the sea. These rural and simple-hearted people, secluded by their remote place of abode from the access of the surrounding world, present a striking picture of old and Celtic England such as it existed two or three hundred years ago. A notion of their solitude and simplicity may be gathered from the fact that, whereas they have no village postman or office, their only mode of intercourse with the outer life of their kind is accomplished through the weekly or other visit of their clergyman. He carries their letters, which contain “the short and simple annals of the poor,” and he receives and returns their weekly and laborious literary compositions to edify and instruct their distant and more civilised correspondents. The address on each letter is often such as to baffle all ordinary curiosity, and unless deciphered by the skill of the experts of the post-office, must often furnish hieroglyphics for the study of the Postmaster-General as obscure, if not so antique, as the legends on a pyramid or Rosetta stone. A visit to a distant market-town is an achievement to render a man an authority or an oracle among his brethren; and one who has accomplished that journey twice or thrice is ever regarded as a daring traveller, and consulted about foreign countries with a feeling of habitual respect.
They have amongst them no farrier for their cattle, no medical man for themselves, no beerhouse, no shop; a man who travels for a distant town supplies them with tea by the ounce, or sugar in smaller quantities still. Not a newspaper is taken in throughout the hamlet, although they are occasionally astonished and delighted by the arrival from some almost forgotten friend in Canada of an ancient copy of the Toronto Gazette. This publication they pore over to weariness, and on Sunday they will worry the clergyman with questions about Transatlantic places and names of which he is obliged to confess himself utterly ignorant, a confession which consciously lowers him in their veneration and respect. An ancient dame once exhibited her Prayer-book, very nearly worn out, printed in the reign of George II., and very much thumbed at the page from which she assiduously prayed for the welfare of Prince Frederick, without one misgiving that she violated the article of our Church which forbids prayer for the dead.
Among the singular traits of character which are developed amid these, whom I may designate in the German phrase as my mossy[139] parishioners, there is one which I should define, in their extreme simplicity, as exuberant belief, or rather faith in excess. I do not, however, intend by this term any kind of religious peculiarity of tenet or creed, but only a prostration of the intellect before certain old traditionary and inherited impulses of the human mind. They share and they embrace those instinctive tendencies of their Celtic nature which in all ages have led their race to cherish a credence in the existence and power of witches, fairies, and the force of charms and spells. It is well known that all such supernatural influences on ordinary life are singularly congenial to the ancient and the modern Cornish mind. I do not exaggerate when I affirm at all events my own persuasion, that two-thirds of the total inhabitants of Tamar-side implicitly believe in the power of the Mal Occhio, as the Italians name it, or the Evil Eye. Is this incredible in a day when the spasms and raps and bad spelling of a familiar spirit are received with acquiescent belief in polished communities, and even in intellectual London? The old notion that a wizard or a witch so became by a nefarious bargain with the enemy of man, and by a surrender of his soul to his ultimate grasp, although still held in many a nook of our western valleys, and by the crooning dame at her solitary hearth, appears to have been exchanged in my hamlet of Holacombe (for such is its name) for a persuasion that these choosers of the slain inherit their faculty from their birth. Whispers of forbidden ties between their parents, and of monstrous and unhallowed alliances of which these children are the issue, largely prevail in this village. There it is held that the witch, like the poet, is so born. I have been gravely assured that there are well-known marks which distinguish the ill-wishers from all beside. These are black spots under the tongue; in number five, diagonally placed: “Like those, sir, which are always found in the feet of swine,”[140] and which, according to the belief of my poor people, and which, as a Scriptural authority, I was supposed unable to deny, were first made in the unclean animals by the entrance of the demons into the ancestral herd at Gadara. A peculiar kind of eyeball, sometimes bright and clear, and at others covered with a filmy gauze, like a gipsy’s eye, as it is said, by night; or a double pupil, ringed twice; or a larger eye on the left than on the right side; these are held to be tokens of evil omen, and accounted to indicate demoniac power, and certain it is that a peculiar glare or a glance of the eye does exist in those persons who are pointed out as in possession of the craft of the wizard or witch. But an ancient man, who lived in a lone house in a gorge near the church, once actually disclosed to me in mysterious whispers, and with many a gesture of alarm and dread, a plan which he had heard from his grandfather, and by which a person evilly inclined, and anxious for more power than men ought to possess, might at any time become a master of the Evil Eye.
“Let him go to chancel,” said he, “to sacrament, and let him hide and bring away the bread[141] from the hands of the priest; then, next midnight let him take it and carry it round the church, widdershins—that is, from south to north,[142] crossing by east three times: the third time there will meet him a big, ugly, venomous toad,[143] gaping and gasping with his mouth opened wide, let him put the bread between the lips of the ghastly creature, and as soon as ever it is swallowed down his throat he will breathe three times upon the man, and he will be made a strong witch for evermore.”
I did not fail to express the horror and disgust with which I had listened to this grandsire’s tale, and to assure him that any man capable of performing such an atrocious ceremony for such a purpose, must be by his very nature fit for every evil desire, and prepared, of his own mere impulse, to form the most unhallowed wishes for the harm of his fellow-creatures, such as a demon only could delight to fulfil. But the feats which are supposed to be achieved by the witch—for the question proposed by the sapient King Jamie has been solved by the Cornish people, whether the Devil doth not oftener dally with ancient women than men—are invariably deeds of loss and harm: Some felon sow, like her of Rokeby,[144] becomes the grunting mother of a large family of farrows; all at once, like Medea,[145] she hates her own offspring with a fiendish hatred, and spurns them all away from her milk. They pine and squeal, and at last sit upright on their hinder parts like pleading children, put their little paws together in piteous fashion, and die one by one. All this would never have come to pass had not the dame, the day before, refused a bottle of milk to one who “should have been a woman,” “but that her beard forbade them to interpret that such she were.” What graphic tales of “things ill-wished” have I not heard around and within this wild and lonely hamlet! All at once a flock or herd would begin to pine away with some strange and nameless disease, the shepherd’s ewes yeaned dead lambs, and were found standing over their lost offspring aghast. Or his cows, “the milky mothers of the herd,” would rush from field to field, “quite mad,” with their tails erect towards the sky, like the bare poles of a ship in distress scudding before the gale; or the brown mare would refuse to be harnessed, and signify her intention to remain in the stall on a busy day, to her master’s infinite disgust. In the more civilised part of my parish the well-to-do farmer would have a remedy. He would mount his horse one break of day on some secret expedition, and be absent for another day or two. Then he returns armed with a packet of white powders, which he scatters carefully, one at every gate on his farm, and his men hear him as he goes muttering in solemn fashion some strange set words, which turn out, when the scroll is submitted to the schoolmaster afterwards, to contain the blessings of the twenty-eighth chapter of Deuteronomy, copied in writing for his use. He has paid a visit, it appears, to a distant town, and been closeted with a well-known public character of the west, popularly called the White Witch, and it is he who has not only exposed the name and arts of the parish practitioner of evil, but has supplied an antidote in the shape of baffling powders and “charms of might.”
Some years agone a violent thunderstorm passed over the hamlet of Holacombe, and wrought great damage in its course. Trees were rooted up, cattle killed, and a rick or two set on fire. It so befell that I visited, the day after, one of the chief agricultural inhabitants of the village, and I found the farmer and his men standing by a ditch wherein lay, heels upward, a fine young horse quite dead. “Here sir,” he shouted, as I came on, “only please to look! is not this a sight to see?” I looked at the poor animal, and uttered my sympathy and regret at the loss.