Their unsociable habits went further. They allowed no one to invade their hovel and pry into their mode of living. If any of them saw a person stand still near the house to observe it, or to watch a Cobbledick at his work or his play, a yelp called the whole clan together, and with howls and curses they set on the inquisitive visitor, pelting him with stones, and flinging sticks at his head, so that he was glad to beat a retreat.
The Cobbledicks were half-naked savages. They wore, for warmth not for decency, some wretched rags. When the scanty supply of garments failed entirely, then the whole crew dispersed over the country, hunting by moonlight for a fresh supply; they stole whatever came in their way that could be converted into covering to clothe their nakedness. Anything served—a potato-sack or a flour-bag. One or other would change into coat or gown by making in it slits for head and arms.
Once a farmer lost an oilcloth stack-covering. It was deliberately taken off his stack one rainy night before he had thatched his wheat. He recognised it torn up and utilised as curtains to the open holes that served as windows to Cobbledick Castle. The farmer prosecuted, but first a rick and then a stack was burned, and he was glad to stay proceedings and suffer the savages to keep his oilcloth, fearing for the thatch of his farmhouse, and himself, his wife and babes beneath it.
When the neighbourhood was aware that the Cobbledicks ran short of raiment, old worn garments were purposely left out at night on hedges for their use.
The migration of Grizzly Cobbledick to the parish of South Tawton took place in this wise. It marked an epoch in the history of the race. The Cobbledicks had not arrived at that stage of civilisation in which property becomes personal. Their views as to property were undeveloped. The world belonged in part to the Cobbledicks, and the rest did not. What belonged to the Cobbledicks belonged to the family, not to any individual in the family. They owned land, reclaimed from the waste long ago, clay land overgrown with rushes, partly bog; but this land was not the property of this Cobbledick or that, male or female, old or young, it belonged to all, on the principle of the Russian mir. Not only so, but the utensils of the house and of the farm were common, so also were the garments. The pipkin cooked for the whole family, and the hoe raised the potatoes for all to eat. The pipkin was not private property when Poll stirred it, the hoe was not private property when Dick worked with it, and the potato-sack was not owned by him or by her who wore it. If, by any chance, it were taken off, it thereby fell back into the common store.
The Cobbledicks never had been civilised. They were autochthones. The oldest inhabitant of Nymet remembered them. They did not increase much, but they did not die out. Their congeners, named the Gubbins, lived in the Lydford glens in Charles the First's reign, when a poet thus described them:—
And near hereto's the Gubbins' cave,
A people that no knowledge have
Of law of God or men;
Whom Cæsar never yet subdued,
Who've lawless lived, of manners rude,
All savage in their den.
By whom, if any pass that way,
He dares not the least time to stay,
For presently they howl;
Upon which signal they do muster
Their naked forces in a cluster,
Led forth by Roger Howle.
One night a star fell from heaven and descended into the hovel of the Cobbledicks through the hole in the roof which allowed the smoke of the communal fire to ascend; and this spark sank into the heart of Old Grizzly—he was not Old Grizzly then. What his name was then in the clan never transpired.
That divine spark conveyed to this particular Cobbledick the idea of personal property. This idea, once conceived, becomes to the social body what a backbone is to the physical organism. There is all the difference in social conditions between those who have accepted personal property and those who have not arrived at it, that exists between vertebrate animals and invertebrate polypi.
Cobbledick rose from his lair by the fire where he had been snoring, caught up a female for whom he had long been sighing, stuffed a wisp of hay into her mouth to prevent her from alarming the sleepers, threw her over his shoulder, and strode out of the Cobbledick hovel.