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25 May.

My dear Art,

We've told yarns by the campfire in the prairies, and dressed one
another's wounds after trying a landing at the Marquesas, and drunk
healths on the shore of Titicaca.  There are more yarns to be told,
and other wounds to be healed, and another health to be drunk.
Won't you let this be at my campfire tomorrow night?  I have no
hesitation in asking you, as I know a certain lady is engaged to a
certain dinner party, and that you are free.  There will only be one
other, our old pal at the Korea, Jack Seward.  He's coming, too, and
we both want to mingle our weeps over the wine cup, and to drink a
health with all our hearts to the happiest man in all the wide
world, who has won the noblest heart that God has made and best
worth winning.  We promise you a hearty welcome, and a loving
greeting, and a health as true as your own right hand.  We shall
both swear to leave you at home if you drink too deep to a certain
pair of eyes.  Come!

Yours, as ever and always,

Quincey P. Morris





TELEGRAM FROM ARTHUR HOLMWOOD TO QUINCEY P. MORRIS

26 May


Count me in every time.  I bear messages which will make both
your ears tingle.

Art




CHAPTER 6


MINA MURRAY'S JOURNAL

24 July.  Whitby.--Lucy met me at the station, looking sweeter and
lovelier than ever, and we drove up to the house at the Crescent in
which they have rooms.  This is a lovely place.  The little river, the
Esk, runs through a deep valley, which broadens out as it comes near
the harbour.  A great viaduct runs across, with high piers, through
which the view seems somehow further away than it really is.  The
valley is beautifully green, and it is so steep that when you are on
the high land on either side you look right across it, unless you are
near enough to see down.  The houses of the old town--the side away
from us, are all red-roofed, and seem piled up one over the other
anyhow, like the pictures we see of Nuremberg.  Right over the town is
the ruin of Whitby Abbey, which was sacked by the Danes, and which is
the scene of part of "Marmion," where the girl was built up in the
wall.  It is a most noble ruin, of immense size, and full of beautiful
and romantic bits.  There is a legend that a white lady is seen in one
of the windows.  Between it and the town there is another church, the
parish one, round which is a big graveyard, all full of tombstones.
This is to my mind the nicest spot in Whitby, for it lies right over
the town, and has a full view of the harbour and all up the bay to
where the headland called Kettleness stretches out into the sea.  It
descends so steeply over the harbour that part of the bank has fallen
away, and some of the graves have been destroyed.

In one place part of the stonework of the graves stretches out over
the sandy pathway far below.  There are walks, with seats beside them,
through the churchyard, and people go and sit there all day long
looking at the beautiful view and enjoying the breeze.

I shall come and sit here often myself and work.  Indeed, I am writing
now, with my book on my knee, and listening to the talk of three old
men who are sitting beside me.  They seem to do nothing all day but
sit here and talk.

The harbour lies below me, with, on the far side, one long granite
wall stretching out into the sea, with a curve outwards at the end of
it, in the middle of which is a lighthouse.  A heavy seawall runs
along outside of it.  On the near side, the seawall makes an elbow
crooked inversely, and its end too has a lighthouse.  Between the two
piers there is a narrow opening into the harbour, which then suddenly
widens.

It is nice at high water, but when the tide is out it shoals away to
nothing, and there is merely the stream of the Esk, running between
banks of sand, with rocks here and there.  Outside the harbour on this
side there rises for about half a mile a great reef, the sharp of
which runs straight out from behind the south lighthouse.  At the end
of it is a buoy with a bell, which swings in bad weather, and sends in
a mournful sound on the wind.

They have a legend here that when a ship is lost bells are heard out at
sea.  I must ask the old man about this.  He is coming this way . . .

He is a funny old man.  He must be awfully old, for his face is
gnarled and twisted like the bark of a tree.  He tells me that he is
nearly a hundred, and that he was a sailor in the Greenland fishing
fleet when Waterloo was fought.  He is, I am afraid, a very sceptical
person, for when I asked him about the bells at sea and the White Lady
at the abbey he said very brusquely,

"I wouldn't fash masel' about them, miss.  Them things be all wore
out.  Mind, I don't say that they never was, but I do say that they
wasn't in my time.  They be all very well for comers and trippers, an'
the like, but not for a nice young lady like you.  Them feet-folks
from York and Leeds that be always eatin' cured herrin's and drinkin'
tea an' lookin' out to buy cheap jet would creed aught.  I wonder
masel' who'd be bothered tellin' lies to them, even the newspapers,
which is full of fool-talk."

I thought he would be a good person to learn interesting 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, and 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 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.


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 down faces 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 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 and
nowt else.  These bans an' wafts an' boh-ghosts an' bar-guests 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 berk-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' trying' to drag their tombsteans with them to prove how
good they was, some of them trimmlin' an' dithering, with their hands
that dozzened an' slippery from lyin' in the sea that they can't even
keep their gurp 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 kirkgarth."

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 haped here, snod an' snog?"  I assented again.  "Then that be just
where the lie comes in.  Why, there be scores of these laybeds that be
toom as old Dun's 'baccabox 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, age 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 currants may have drifted them.
There be the steans around ye.  Ye can, with your young eyes, read the