A Son of Hagar: A Romance of Our Time

by Sir Hall Caine

When the rush-bearers came up to the front of the church, the lych-gate was thrown open and they filed through.

"How tired he looks, the brave little boy!" said Greta, picking up the foremost of the company, the tiny man in the epaulets, now covered with the dust of the roads.

"The little ones first, and you great girls afterward," said the parson. "Those with flowers go up to the communion and lay them on the form, and those with mosses put them on the font, and those with rushes and ferns begin under the pulpit and come down the aisle to the porch."

The stalwart little tramp in Greta's arms wriggled his way to the ground. He had mosses in his hands and must go first. Then the children trooped into the church, and in an instant the rude old place was alive with the buzz of prattling tongues.

The floor covered many a tomb. Graven on the plain slabs that formed the pathway down the middle of the church were the names of the men and women who had lived and died in the dale generations gone by. In their own day they were children themselves; and now other children—their own children's children's children—with never a thought about what lay beneath, with only love in their eyes, and laughter on their lips, and life in their limbs—were strewing rushes down the path above them.

In ten minutes there was not an inch of the flagged aisle visible. All was green from the communion to the porch. Here and there an adventurous lad, turning to account the skill at climbing acquired at birds'-nesting, had clambered over the pews to the rude cross-trees, and hung great bunches of rushes from the roof.

"Now, children, let us sing," said the parson, and taking up the accordion, he started a hymn.

The leaded windows of the old church stood open, and the sweet young voices floated away, and far away, over the uplands and the dale. And the birds still sung in the blue sky, and the ghylls still rumbled in the distance, and the light wind still souched through the long grass, and the morning sunlight shone over all.

There was a cloud of dust on the road, and presently there came trooping down from the village a company of men, surrounded by a whole circuit of dogs. Snarls, and yaps, and yelps, and squawks, and guffaws, and sometimes the cachinnation and crow of cocks, broke upon the clear air. The roystering set would be as many as a dozen, and all were more or less drunk. First came John Proudfoot, the blacksmith, in his shirt-sleeves, with his leathern apron wrapped in a knot about his waist, and a silver and black game-cock imprisoned under his arm. Lang Geordie Moore, his young helper, carried another fowl. Dick o' the Syke, the miller, in a brown coat whitened with flour, walked abreast of Geordie and tickled the gills of the fowl with a straw. Job Sheepshanks, the letter-cutter, carried a pot of pitch and a brush, and little Tom o' Dint hobbled along with a handful of iron files. Behind these came the landlord of the Flying Horse, with a basket over one arm, from which peeped the corks of many bottles, and Natt, the stableman at the Ghyll, carried a wicker cage, in which sat a red bantam-cock with spurs that glittered in the light.

There was one other man who walked with the company, and he was the soul of the noisy crew; his voice was the loudest, his laugh the longest, and half of all that was said was addressed to him. He was a lusty man with a florid face; he wore a suit of tweeds plaided in wide stripes of buff and black.