“She went off very slow, wi’ a nigger to support her at each elbow, an’ a fine young brown woman to look after her. An’ I was took in the kitchen, an’ had such a bellyful of meat an’ drink as minded me of Christmas up to Hartland Farm in the old days. “Then the chap—he lets me into the riddle of it all. You see his mother was Farmer Blake’s darter—the first as ever saved land in these parts, an’ rented from the Duchy more’n a hundred years agone now. An’ when Princetown was made for a prison to hold the French us catched in the wars, there comed a Monseer Damian among the prisoners. Him an’ many other gents the authorities let out on parole, as they say; an’ he made friends with Farmer Blake, an’ falled in love with Margery Blake. An’ when war was done, if he didn’t marry her all correct an’ snatch her away to foreign parts! Martinique was left to the French, an’ he took her to that island first, then to Trinidad, which be ours, then to Tobago, which be also ours. There the man prospered, an’ growed sugar, an’ did very flourishing, an’ comed to be first an’ richest party in the island. But smallpox took him in middle life, an’ it took all his children but his eldest son, Matthew Damian. He bided with his mother, an’ married a French woman from Guadeloupe. “An’ ’twas old lady’s hope an’ prayer for seventy year to hear good Devon spoke again some day. Her only got to hunger terrible for the old country when her childer an’ her husband died, by which time she was too old to travel home again. An’ the Postbridge Blakes had all gone dead ages afore; an’ in truth there couldn’t have been a soul on Dartymoor as remembered her. Of course her son knowed the sound of the speech, from hearing his mother, as never lost it; an’ when he catched me telling to myself, his first thought was for her. “’Twas meat an’ drink to her, sure enough; an’ meat an’ drink to me too, for that matter, because I never left the Man-o’-War Bay Sugar Estate no more. Very little work I done at first, for old Mrs. Damian would have me keep on ’bout home every afternoon in the verandah; but six months after I comed there she died, happy as a bird; an’ if I wasn’t down for fifty pound in her will! “Richest people in Tobago, they was; an’ then I settled to work for Matthew Damian, an’ when he died, seventeen year after, the head man was pensioned off, an’ I got the billet under Matthew Damian’s son, who be my master now. An’ there I’ll work to the end, an’ my childern after me, please the Lord.” * * * * * “’Tis a very fine tale, Mr. Bates, if I may speak for the company,” said Merryweather Chugg; “an’ it do show what a blessing it be to come out of Devonshire. If you’d been a foreigner, now, none of these good things would have happened to ’e.” “I mind my faither telling about Farmer Blake an’ how he helped to carry his coffin to Widecombe soon after I was born,” said Gaffer Pearn.