Bligh, being naked and unarmed, casts a look round for some way to help himself. He was a plucky fellow enough in a fight, as I've said: but I leave you to guess what he felt like when to right and left of him the bushes parted, and forth stepped half-a-dozen men in black suits with black silk weepers a foot and a half wide tied in great bunches round their hats. These were Sam Trewhella, of course, and the rest of the funeral-party, that had left the coffin in a nice shady spot inside the Vicarage garden-gate, and come along to assist the law. They had brought along pretty nearly all the menkind of the parish beside: but these, being in their work-a-day clothes, didn't appear, and for a reason you'll learn by-and-by. All that Bligh saw was this dismal company of mourners backed by a rabble of school-children, the little ones lining the shore and staring at him fearsomely with their fingers in their mouths. For the moment Bligh must have thought himself dreaming. But there they stood, the men in black and the crowd of children, and my grandfather with the stretcher ready, and the green woods so quiet all round. And there he stood up to the ribs in water, and the tide and his temper rising. "Look here, you something-or-other yokels," he called out, "if this is one of your village jokes, I promise you shall smart for it. Leave the spot this moment, fetch that idiot out of the boat, and take away the children. I want to dress, and it isn't decent!" "Mounseer," answers my grandfather, "I daresay you've a-done it for your country; but we've a-caught you, and now you must go to prison--wee, wee, to preeson," he says, lisping it in a Frenchified way so as to make himself understood. Bligh began to foam. "The longer you keep up this farce, my fine fellows, the worse you'll smart for it! There's a magistrate in this parish, as I happen to know." "There _was_," said my grandfather; "but we've strong reasons to believe he's been made away with." "The only thing we could find of 'en," put in Arch'laus Spry, "was a shin-bone and a pint of ashes. I don't know if the others noticed it, but to my notion there was a sniff of brimstone about the premises; and I've always been remarkable for my sense of smell." "You won't deny," my grandfather went on, "that you've been making a map of this here river; for here it is in your tail-coat pocket." "You insolent ruffian, put that down at once! I tell you that I'm a British officer and a gentleman!" "_And_ a Papist," went on my grandfather, holding up a ribbon with a bullet threaded to it. ('Twas the bullet Bligh used to weigh out allowances with on his voyage in the open boat after the mutineers had turned him adrift from the _Bounty_, and he wore it ever after.) "See here, friends: did you ever know an honest Protestant to wear such a thing about him inside his clothes?"