“Stay a bit longer,” said the young man, as I rose when the shower ceased; “I like to hear ye talk.”
And I liked to hear him talk, especially as he began to praise his wife. It was such a pleasure to come home when there was such a lass as that to make a man comfortable. Nobody could beat her at making a shirt or making bread, or cooking; and he opened the oven to show me how much room there was for the loaves. Scarcely a cottage but has a grate with iron oven attached, and in some places the overpowering heat reminded me of my friend’s house in Ulrichsthal. Then we had a little discourse about books. He liked reading, and had a Bible for Sundays, and a few odd volumes which he read in the evenings, but not without difficulty; it was so hard to keep awake after a day out of doors.
Meanwhile I made enticing signs to the merry little lassie, and at last she sat without fear on my knee, and listened with a happy smile and wondering eyes to my chant of the pastoral legend of Little Bopeep. Such good friends did we become, that when at length I said “good-bye,” and shook hands, there was a general expression of regret, and a hope that I would call again. I certainly will the next time I visit Holderness.
Often since has this incident recurred to my mind, and most often when the discussion was going on in the newspapers concerning the impropriety of marriage on three hundred a year. I wished that the writers, especially he who sneered at domestic life, could go down into Yorkshire, and see how much happiness may be had for less than fifty pounds a year. As if any selfish bachelor enjoyments, any of the talk of the clubs, were worth the prattle of infancy, the happy voices of childhood, the pleasures and duties that come with offspring! Sandeau deserved to be made Académicien, if only for having said that “un berceau est plus éloquent qu’une chaire, et rien n’enseigne mieux à l’homme les côtés sérieux de sa destinée.”
A mile or two farther and water gleams through the trees on the right. It is Hornsea Mere, nearly two miles in length, and soon, when the road skirts the margin, you see reedy shallows, the resort of wild-fowl, and swans floating around the wooded islands; and at the upper end the belts and masses of trees under which the visitors to Hornsea find pleasant walks while sauntering out to the sylvan scenery of Wassand and Sigglesthorne. The lake, said a passing villager, averages ten feet in depth, with perhaps as much more of mud, and swarms with fish, chiefly pike and perch. He added something about the great people of the neighbourhood, who would not let a poor fellow fish in the mere, and ordered the keeper to duck even little boys poaching with stick and string. And he recited with a gruff chuckle a rhyming epitaph which one of his neighbours had composed to the memory of a clergyman who had made himself particularly obnoxious. It did not flatter the deceased.
In Henry the Third’s reign, as may be read in the Liber Melsæ, or Chronicle of the Abbey of Meaux, the Abbot of St. Mary’s at York quarrelled with him of Meaux, about the right to fish in the mere, and not being able to decide the quarrel by argument, the pious churchmen had recourse to arms. Each party hired combatants, who met on the appointed day, and after a horse had been swum across the mere, and stakes had been planted to mark the Abbot of St. Mary’s claim, they fought from morning until nightfall, and Meaux lost the battle, and with it his ancient right of fishery.
In Elizabeth’s reign, the Countess of Warwick granted to Marmaduke Constable the right to fish and fowl for “the some of fyftye and five pounds of lawful English money.” This Marmaduke, who thus testified his love of fin and feather, was an ancestor of Sir Clifford Constable, the present “Lord Paramount,” upon whom the blind fiddler exercised his wit.
Hornsea church stands on an eminence at the eastern end between the mere and the village. Its low square tower once bore a tall spire, on which, as is said, the builder had cut an inscription:—
Hornsea steeple, when I built thee,
Thou was 10 miles off Burlington,
Ten miles off Beverley, and 10 miles off sea;
but it fell during a gale in 1773. The edifice is a specimen of fifteenth-century architecture, with portions of an earlier date. The crypt under the chancel was at one time a receptacle for smuggled goods, and the clerk was down there doing unlawful work when the tempest smote the spire, and frightened him well-nigh to death. The memory of the last rector is preserved by an altar tomb of alabaster, and of William Day, gentleman, who “dyed” in 1616, by a curious epitaph: