With a mind quite empty he entered the inn, ordered his drink and waited to catch the thread of the conversation before taking his part in it. Taverner was there, and old Huggins. The latter talked, and half-a dozen men in the bar listened to him. Noah Pearn served his customer with liquor and explained the subject. "Valentine here be running on the past to-day, and he's gone back fifty years in his memory as easy as we go back a month. He often will after a third glass. 'Tis a pity there's none to write down the things he calls home; for they'll all perish with him, and some of 'em be very well worth remembering." He stopped, and they listened to the ancient. "Them days of barley bread! But which among you folk ever tasted it? Harsh it was and made us far shorter and sharper than we be nowadays. I've seed a chap buried at cross-roads with a stake drove through his carcase. 'Twas thought he'd killed hisself, and cross-roads was the grave of such people then. By night they buried him; and by night they dug him up again." "Dug him up, Val!" cried Mr. Pearn. "Surely not. What for did they dig him up again?" "Because a year later 'twas found that he'd died by lawful murder and never took his life at all! A valiant man, as stopped coaches on the Launceston Road, was catched red-handed, and tried to Exeter, and hanged 'pon Gibbet Hill above Mary Tavy. The last hanging there 'twas--somewhere about the year 1790, I reckon, or may have been later. But I went to see the sight, as a small boy, and afore they turned the bold feller off, he confessed that among other wicked things, he'd put a bullet through the chap we buried, because the chap had seed him stop a coach and marked him. And he'd left a old hoss-pistol by the chap a purpose to make it look as if he'd done it hisself. So they dug him up again and gived his fragments a proper box, and laid him in holy ground, and parson made a whole-hearted speech about it, and forgived everybody, as he hoped to be forgiven." "The things you've seen!" murmured a young man. "True for you--few living have seen the like. Ripe old customs, as be gone past recalling. And religion at the back of all we did and thought in them days. Even wassailing the apple-trees be dying out, and charms, and all them high ways we had of reproving lightness and sin, and punishing evil-doers afore the nation. I never seed a human creature whipped at the cart-tail myself, and I'm glad I didn't, for that's a very horrid idea, though 'twas often well enough deserved; but other things I have seen, when the evil-doer has been catched out in his sins and held up in the sight of all men. 'Twas a sign, no doubt, that men were rising in knowledge and understanding when we punished their minds instead of their backs, and made them a sign and a byword without putting a hand upon 'em." Mr. Huggins paused, quite weary. He had been talking a long time, and before Weekes arrived he had sung an old song to an old tune.