John Herring: A West of England Romance. Volume 1 (of 3)Baring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
General
John Herring: A West of England Romance. Volume 1 (of 3)
Baring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
West Country (England) -- Fiction
First they filled up the interstices between the blocks of granite of
the dolmen with turf and moss, then they strewed the floor with bracken,
and made bed and seat of heather. Then they marked out a portion of the
moor, collected stones from off the surface with infinite labour, and
fenced it round with these stones set as a dry wall. This they tilled,
and, their appetite for property growing, they inclosed more. The
tillage was rude, but then it was the beginning of tillage to the whole
Cobbledick race. It took that race six thousand years to arrive at a
crooked stick with Mrs. Grizzly dragging it, and Mr. Grizzly driving
with a switch, and his weight resting on the tail of the simple plough.
When he took his weight off, to quicken the motions of Mrs. Grizzly with
the switch, the plough levered out of the ground, she fell, and he also
was thrown forward on his nose. When Grizzly left the ancestral seat,
he carried with him, in addition to a woman, two ferrets in a bag, and a
sharp flintstone. With the ferrets he caught rabbits, and with the
stone he flayed them. Grizzly was a neolithic man.
On their first taking possession of the cromlech, Grizzly fought his
wife for the sack she wore. He wanted to utilise it as a screen for the
entrance. The door was to the south, but the south wind is a rainy wind
and must be shut out.
Mrs. Grizzly resisted, for the same heavenly spark that had brought to
him the idea of appropriating one woman as wife, had carried to her also
the idea of keeping as her own, her very own, the one potato-sack in
which she walked and worked and slept.
This resistance on her part stimulated invention on his. He devised a
screen of wattles and heather for the door, and this proved a better
shelter than any sack could have made. Thus we see how the sense of
property quickens invention. The heavenly spark never expired in the
breasts of the Cobbledicks; they felt no desire, like the Apostles of
old and reformers of the present day, to revert to the conditions from
which they had escaped. The spark burned brighter, it demanded fuel.
They proceeded to obtain a cow. How they procured it nobody knew,
though all suspected. The Cobbledicks disappeared from Tawton parish for
several days. When they reappeared they were driving a cow before them
down the flanks of Cosdon. Had they fished her out of the swamps round
Cranmere pool? or had they gone far, far beyond, and acquired her in the
South Hams, and driven her across the moor, leaving no traces in the
spongy soil and on the blooming heather whereby they might be traced, in
the event of those from whom she had been acquired disputing their right
to make off with her?
But if this latter were the case, what labour and perseverance it must
have cost them to convey a cow across brawling torrents, over
granite-strewn mountains, and through treacherous bogs!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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