Datasets:
Beifengdo
/
Python-Learning

Dataset card Data Studio Files
xet
 Community
text
stringlengths
0
73
things from, so I asked him if he would mind telling me something about
the whale-fishing in the old days. He was just settling himself to begin
when the clock struck six, whereupon he laboured to get up, and said:--
"I must gang ageeanwards home now, miss. My grand-daughter doesn't like
to be kept waitin' when the tea is ready, for it takes me time to
crammle aboon the grees, for there be a many of 'em; an', miss, I lack
belly-timber sairly by the clock."
He hobbled away, and I could see him hurrying, as well as he could, down
the steps. The steps are a great feature on the place. They lead from
the town up to the church, there are hundreds of them--I do not know how
many--and they wind up in a delicate curve; the slope is so gentle that
a horse could easily walk up and down them. I think they must originally
have had something to do with the abbey. I shall go home too. Lucy went
out visiting with her mother, and as they were only duty calls, I did
not go. They will be home by this.
* * * * *
_1 August._--I came up here an hour ago with Lucy, and we had a most
interesting talk with my old friend and the two others who always come
and join him. He is evidently the Sir Oracle of them, and I should think
must have been in his time a most dictatorial person. He will not admit
anything, and downfaces everybody. If he can't out-argue them he bullies
them, and then takes their silence for agreement with his views. Lucy
was looking sweetly pretty in her white lawn frock; she has got a
beautiful colour since she has been here. I noticed that the old men did
not lose any time in coming up and sitting near her when we sat down.
She is so sweet with old people; I think they all fell in love with her
on the spot. Even my old man succumbed and did not contradict her, but
gave me double share instead. I got him on the subject of the legends,
and he went off at once into a sort of sermon. I must try to remember it
and put it down:--
"It be all fool-talk, lock, stock, and barrel; that's what it be, an'
nowt else. These bans an' wafts an' boh-ghosts an' barguests an' bogles
an' all anent them is only fit to set bairns an' dizzy women
a-belderin'. They be nowt but air-blebs. They, an' all grims an' signs
an' warnin's, be all invented by parsons an' illsome beuk-bodies an'
railway touters to skeer an' scunner hafflin's, an' to get folks to do
somethin' that they don't other incline to. It makes me ireful to think
o' them. Why, it's them that, not content with printin' lies on paper
an' preachin' them out of pulpits, does want to be cuttin' them on the
tombstones. Look here all around you in what airt ye will; all them
steans, holdin' up their heads as well as they can out of their pride,
is acant--simply tumblin' down with the weight o' the lies wrote on
them, 'Here lies the body' or 'Sacred to the memory' wrote on all of
them, an' yet in nigh half of them there bean't no bodies at all; an'
the memories of them bean't cared a pinch of snuff about, much less
sacred. Lies all of them, nothin' but lies of one kind or another! My
gog, but it'll be a quare scowderment at the Day of Judgment when they
come tumblin' up in their death-sarks, all jouped together an' tryin' to
drag their tombsteans with them to prove how good they was; some of them
trimmlin' and ditherin', with their hands that dozzened an' slippy from
lyin' in the sea that they can't even keep their grup o' them."
I could see from the old fellow's self-satisfied air and the way in
which he looked round for the approval of his cronies that he was
"showing off," so I put in a word to keep him going:--
"Oh, Mr. Swales, you can't be serious. Surely these tombstones are not
all wrong?"
"Yabblins! There may be a poorish few not wrong, savin' where they make
out the people too good; for there be folk that do think a balm-bowl be
like the sea, if only it be their own. The whole thing be only lies. Now
look you here; you come here a stranger, an' you see this kirk-garth." I
nodded, for I thought it better to assent, though I did not quite
understand his dialect. I knew it had something to do with the church.
He went on: "And you consate that all these steans be aboon folk that be
happed here, snod an' snog?" I assented again. "Then that be just where
the lie comes in. Why, there be scores of these lay-beds that be toom as
old Dun's 'bacca-box on Friday night." He nudged one of his companions,
and they all laughed. "And my gog! how could they be otherwise? Look at
that one, the aftest abaft the bier-bank: read it!" I went over and
read:--
"Edward Spencelagh, master mariner, murdered by pirates off the coast of
Andres, April, 1854, æt. 30." When I came back Mr. Swales went on:--
"Who brought him home, I wonder, to hap him here? Murdered off the coast
of Andres! an' you consated his body lay under! Why, I could name ye a
dozen whose bones lie in the Greenland seas above"--he pointed
northwards--"or where the currents may have drifted them. There be the
steans around ye. Ye can, with your young eyes, read the small-print of
the lies from here. This Braithwaite Lowrey--I knew his father, lost in
the _Lively_ off Greenland in '20; or Andrew Woodhouse, drowned in the
same seas in 1777; or John Paxton, drowned off Cape Farewell a year
later; or old John Rawlings, whose grandfather sailed with me, drowned
in the Gulf of Finland in '50. Do ye think that all these men will have
to make a rush to Whitby when the trumpet sounds? I have me antherums
aboot it! I tell ye that when they got here they'd be jommlin' an'
jostlin' one another that way that it 'ud be like a fight up on the ice
in the old days, when we'd be at one another from daylight to dark, an'
tryin' to tie up our cuts by the light of the aurora borealis." This was
evidently local pleasantry, for the old man cackled over it, and his
cronies joined in with gusto.
"But," I said, "surely you are not quite correct, for you start on the