Urith: A Tale of Dartmoor

by S. Baring-Gould

The old man walked towards the saw-pit. The tree was there, lying on the frame ready to be sawn into planks, and already it was in part cut through. The men had been there, begun their task; then had gone off, probably to the house to drink his cider and discuss his ruin.

Below his feet the pit gaped, some ten or eleven feet, with oak sawdust at the bottom, dry and fragrant. Round the edges of the pit the hart's-tongue fern and the pennywort had lodged between the stones and luxuriated, the latter throwing up at this time its white spires of flower.

A magnificent plume of fern occupied one end of the trough. Bashes and oak-coppice were around, and almost concealed the saw-pit from the road.

That saw-pit seemed to the old man to be a grave, and a grave that invited an occupant.

He knelt on the cross-piece on which the upper sawyer stands when engaged on his work, and round it fastened firmly the end of the rope; then fixed the halter with running knot about his own neck.

He stood up and bent his grey head, threw his hat on one side, and looked down into the trough.

He had come to the end. Everything was gone, or going, from him—even a sepulchre with his fathers, for, if he died by his own hand, then he would not be buried with them, but near that saw-pit, where a cross-way led to Black Down. It was well that so it should be; so he would retain, at all events, six foot of the paternal inheritance. That six foot would be his inalienably, and that would be better than banishment to the churchyard of Peter Tavy. But he would make sure that he carried with him something of the ancestral land. He crept along the beam, with the rope about his neck, fastened near the middle of the saw-pit, like a dog running to the extent of his chain, and scrabbled up some of the soil, with which he stuffed his ears and his mouth, and filled his hands.

Thus furnished, he stepped back, and again looked down. He did not pray. He had no thought about his soul—about heaven. His mind was fixed on the earth—the earth of Hall, with which he must part, with all but what he held, and with which he had choked his mouth.

"Earth to earth!"