None, high or low, during the lifetime of the squire, were allowed with impunity to injure or harass his cross-grained jester, and many a mischievous escapade was hushed up, and the sufferer soothed or pacified by money or influence. When gout and old age had imprisoned Mr. Arscott in his easy-chair, Black John snoozed among the ashes of the vast wood fires of the hearth, or lay coiled upon his rug like some faithful mastiff, watching every look and gesture of his master; starting up to fill the pipe or the tankard of old ale, and then crouching again. “This lasted long; it fain would last Till autumn rustled on the blast,”[63] and the good old squire, in the language of the Tamar-side, “passed out of it.” At his death and funeral, the agony of his misshapen retainer was unappeasable. He had to be removed by force from the door of the vault, and then he utterly refused to depart from the neighbourhood of the grave. He made himself another lair, near the churchyard wall, and there he sobbed away the brief remnant of his days, in honest and unavailing grief for the protector whom he had so loved in life, and from whom in death he would not be divided. Thus and there, not long after, he died, as the old men of the parish used to relate, for the “second and last time.” He had what is called in those parts a decent funeral, for his master had bequeathed to him an ample allowance for life and death in his last will. The mourners ate of the fat and drank of the strong, as their Celtic impulses would suggest; and although some among them, who remembered John’s former funeral, may have listened again for a token or sign, poor Black John, alas for him! had no master to come back to now, and declined “to bumpy” any more. A singular and striking circumstance attended the final funeral of Black John. An aged crone, bent and tottering, “worn Nature’s mournful monument,” was observed following the bier, and the people heard her muttering ever and anon, “Oh, is he really dead? He came to life again once you know, and lived long after.” When assured that all indeed was over, even her wild hope, she cried with a great sob, “O poor dear Johnny! he was so good-looking and so steady till they spoilt him up at the Hall!” Her words recalled her to the memory of some old men who were there, and they knew her as a certain Aunty Bridget, who had been teased and worried, long years agone, at markets and fairs, as “Black John’s sweetheart.” FOOTNOTES: [55] From _All the Year Round_, vol. xiii. pp. 454-456. 1865. [56] See Appendix C. [57] Compare Hawker’s fine description of the feast at Dundagel in “The Quest of the Sangraal”-- “Strong men for meat, and warriors at the wine, They wreak the wrath of hunger on the beeves, They rend rich morsels from the savoury deer, And quench the flagon like Brun-guillie dew!”