"As for that," my grandfather answers, "I only wish I could say yes or no: for 'twould be a relief even to know the worst." He beckoned very mysterious-like and led the Parson a couple of hundred yards up the foreshore, with Arch'laus Spry following. And there they came to a halt, all three, before a rock that someone had been daubing with whitewash. On the top of the cliff, right above, was planted a stick with a little white flag. "Now, Sir, as a Justice of the Peace, what d'ee think of it?" Parson Polwhele stared from the rock to the stick and couldn't say. So he turns to Arch'laus Spry and asks: "Any person taken ill in your parish?" "No, Sir." "You're sure Billy Johns hasn't been drinking again?" Billy Johns was the landlord of the "Passage Inn," a very ordinary man by rule, but given to breaking loose among his own liquors. "He seemed all right yesterday when I hired the trap off him; but he does the most unaccountable things when he's taken bad." "He never did anything so far out of nature as this here; and I can mind him in six outbreaks," answered my grandfather. "Besides, 'tis not Billy Johns nor anyone like him." "Then you know who did it?" "I do and I don't, Sir. But take a look round, if you please." The Parson looked up and down and across the river; and, sure, enough, whichever way he turned, his eyes fell on splashes of whitewash and little flags fluttering. They seemed to stretch right away from Porthnavas down to the river's mouth; and though he couldn't see it from where he stood, even Mawnan church-tower had been given a lick of the brush. "But," said the Parson, fairly puzzled, "all this can only have happened in broad daylight, and you must have caught the fellow at it, whoever he is." "I wouldn't go so far as to say I caught him," answered my grandfather, modest-like; "but I came upon him a little above Bosahan in the act of setting up one of his flags, and I asked him, in the King's name, what he meant by it." "And what did he answer?" My grandfather looked over his shoulder. "I couldn't, Sir, not for a pocketful of crowns, and your good lady, so to speak, within hearing." "Nonsense, man! She's not within a hundred yards." "Well, then, Sir, he up and hoped the devil would fly away with me, and from that he went on to say--" But here my grandfather came to a dead halt. "No, Sir, I can't; and as a Minister of the Gospel, you'll never insist on it. He made such horrible statements that I had to go straight home and read over my old mother's marriage lines. It fairly dazed me to hear him talk so confident, and she in her grave, poor soul!" "You ought to have demanded his name." "I did, Sir; naturally I did. And he told me to go to the naughty place for it." "Well, but what like is he?" "Oh, as to that, Sir, a man of ordinary shape, like yourself, in a plain blue coat and a wig shorter than ordinary; nothing about him to prepare you for the language he lets fly."