England -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Islands -- Fiction
from the water and carting them away for dear life. My father and the
little people couldn't much as ever lay hands on a solitary one, and,
what was worse they hadn't but fairly broached it before a cry went up
that the Preventive men were coming. Sure enough, my father, pricking
up his ears, could hear horses gallopin' down along the road above the
sands. 'Dear, dear!' says the little man, 'this is a most annoyin'
thing to happen! But luckily I know a place where there's better liquor
still, and no risk of bein' interrupted. So _Ho! and away for Squire
Tremayne's cellar!_'
"'_Ho! and away for Squire Tremayne's cellar!_' called out my father;
and the next thing he knew he found himself in the cellar of Squire
Tremayne's great house at Heligan, knocking around with the small
people among casks of wine and barrels of beer galore. To do him
justice, he never pretended he didn't make use of the occasion. In
fact, he fuddled himself so that when the little gentleman called out
'_Ho! and away!_ for the next randivoo' (whatever that might ha' been),
he missed to take up the catchword, bein' asleep belike. So there the
piskies left him asleep, with his head in a waste saucer and his mouth
under the drip of a spigot; and there the butler found him the next
morning, knocking his shins among the butts and barrels in the
darkness, and calling out to know what the dickens had taken Tregarden
Down and the rocks o't, that they grew so pesky close together. The
butler haled him upstairs to the Squire, and the Squire heard his
story, and not only said he didn't believe a word o't, but (bein' a
magistrate) packed him off to Bodmin Jail for burglary. I don't blame
the man altogether," said Jan, reflectively; "for, come to think of it,
my father's account of himself lay a bit off the ordinary run, and
belike he wasn't in any condition to put it clearly.
"At any rate, to jail he went, and from jail he was delivered up to the
Judges at Assize, and the Judges sentenced my poor father to death,
which was the punishment for burglary in those times, and, for all I
know, it may be the same on the mainland to this day.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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