“We Mendip folk,” said Mr. Ingleby, “are a strange people, very different in our physique from the broad Saxons of the turf-moors beneath us. I suppose there is a good deal of Cornish blood in us. Wherever there are mines there are Cornishmen; but I think there’s another, older strain: Iberian . . . Roman . . . Phoenician. I don’t know what it is; but I do know that we’re somehow different from all the rest of the Somerset people: a violent, savage sort of folk. Did you ever hear of Hannah More?” “No.” Edwin had been born too late in the century. “Well, she was before my time too; but she made the Mendip miners notorious by trying to convert them. I don’t suppose she succeeded. At any rate neither she nor her influences would ever have converted your grandfather. He was a wonderful man. Even though my memory is mostly of the way in which I was afraid of him, I can see what a wonderful man he was. And your Uncle Will would tell you the same.” “He was a miner . . . ?” “Yes. . . . A miner amongst other things. He was a dowser too.” “A dowser? What is that?” “Don’t you know? The divining-rod. A thing that all the scientists have been unable to explain. In a dry country like Mendip the dowser is a most important person; for neither man nor beast can live without water, and he is the only person who can tell where a well should be sunk. Your grandfather was a strange looking man with very clear grey eyes under a black head of hair and heavy bristling brows. Even when he grew very old his hair and his beard were black. “I was the youngest of the family. All the others, except your Uncle Will, have died—and for some reason or other I was not brought up in my father’s cottage but in that of my grandmother, a tiny, tumbledown affair lying in the valley under Silbury. We were very humble people, Eddie. I don’t suppose anywhere in the world I could have passed a quieter childhood. It’s a long way off now. One only remembers curious, unimportant things. “When I was four years old I was sent to the village school. I don’t think it exists any longer. You see the population of Highberrow disappeared naturally with the abandonment of the mining. Even in my childhood, as I told you, the workings were running pretty thin. The miners were beginning to find that they couldn’t pick up much of a living on their own calamine claims; and so they drifted back gradually—your grandfather along with them—to the oldest workings of all: the mines that the Romans had made two thousand years ago. You may be certain that the Romans, with their thoroughness, hadn’t left much behind. Why, in their days, Mendip must have been a great place, with a harbour of its own on the mouth of the Ax, and great roads radiating everywhere: to Cirencester, Exeter, and Bath. Even in the Middle Ages there was a population of fifty thousand souls on Mendip. Now I don’t suppose there are a thousand in all the mining villages put together.