Produced by Lionel Sear
To T. Wemyss Reid.
I. How I Dined at the "Indian Queens".
II. What I Saw in the Mirror.
III. What I Saw in the Tarn.
IV. What I have Since Learnt
In those west-country parishes where but a few years back the feast ofChristmas Eve was usually prolonged with cake and cider, "crowding," and"geese dancing," till the ancient carols ushered in the day, a certainlanguor not seldom pervaded the services of the Church a few hourslater. Red eyes and heavy, young limbs hardly rested from the DashingWhite Sergeant and Sir Roger, throats husky from a plurality ofcauses—all these were recognised as proper to the season, and, in fact,of a piece with the holly on the communion rails.
On a dark and stormy Christmas morning as far back as the first decadeof the century, this languor was neither more nor less apparent thanusual inside the small parish church of Ruan Lanihale, althoughChristmas fell that year on a Sunday, and dancing should, by rights,have ceased at midnight. The building stands high above a bleakpeninsula on the South Coast, and the congregation had struggled up withheads slanted sou'-west against the weather that drove up the Channel ina black fog. Now, having gained shelter, they quickly lost the glow ofendeavour, and mixed in pleasing stupor the humming of the storm in thetower above, its intermittent onslaughts on the leadwork of the southernwindows, and the voice of Parson Babbage lifted now and again from thechancel as if to correct the shambling pace of the choir in the westgallery.
"Mark me," whispered Old Zeb Minards, crowder and leader of themusicians, sitting back at the end of the Psalms, and eyeing his fiddledubiously; "If Sternhold be sober this morning, Hopkins be drunk as afly, or 'tis t'other way round."
"'Twas middlin' wambly," assented Calvin Oke, the second fiddle—ascrew-faced man tightly wound about the throat with a yellow kerchief.
"An' 'tis a delicate matter to cuss the singers when the musicianers betwice as bad."
"I'd a very present sense of being a bar or more behind the fair—that Ican honestly vow," put in Elias