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1 August

– I came up here an hour ago with Lucy, and we had a most interesting talk with my old friend and the two others who always come and join him. He is evidently the Sir Oracle of them, and I should think must have been in his time a most dictatorial person.

He will not admit anything, and down faces everybody. If he can’t out-argue them he bullies them, and then takes their silence for agreement with his views.

Lucy was looking sweetly pretty in her white lawn frock. She has got a beautiful colour since she has been here.

I noticed that the old men did not lose any time in coming and sitting near her when we sat down. She is so sweet with old people, I think they all fell in love with her on the spot. Even my old man succumbed and did not contradict her, but gave me double share instead. I got him on the subject of the legends, and he went off at once into a sort of sermon. I must try to remember it and put it down.

I could see from the old fellow’s self-satisfied air and the way in which he looked round for the approval of his cronies that he was ‘showing off,’ so I put in a word to keep him going.

‘Oh, Mr. Swales, you can’t be serious. Surely these tombstones are not all wrong?’

I nodded, for I thought it better to assent, though I did not quite understand his dialect. I knew it had something to do with the church.

I went over and read, ‘Edward Spencelagh, master mariner, murdered by pirates off the coast of Andres, April, 1854, age 30.’ When I came back Mr. Swales went on,

‘But,’ I said, ‘surely you are not quite correct, for you start on the assumption that all the poor people, or their spirits, will have to take their tombstones with them on the Day of Judgment. Do you think that will be really necessary?’

‘Well, what else be they tombstones for? Answer me that, miss!’

‘To please their relatives, I suppose.’

‘To please their relatives, you suppose!’ This he said with intense scorn. ‘How will it pleasure their relatives to know that lies is wrote over them, and that everybody in the place knows that they be lies?’

The letters were upside down to me from where I sat, but Lucy was more opposite to them, so she leant over and read, ‘Sacred to the memory of George Canon, who died, in the hope of a glorious resurrection, on July 29,1873,falling from the rocks at Kettleness. This tomb was erected by his sorrowing mother to her dearly beloved son. ‘He was the only son of his mother, and she was a widow.’ Really, Mr. Swales, I don’t see anything very funny in that!’ She spoke her comment very gravely and somewhat severely.

I did not know what to say, but Lucy turned the conversation as she said, rising up, ‘Oh, why did you tell us of this? It is my favorite seat, and I cannot leave it, and now I find I must go on sitting over the grave of a suicide.’

‘That won’t harm ye, my pretty, an’ it may make poor Geordie gladsome to have so trim a lass sittin’ on his lap. That won’t hurt ye. Why, I’ve sat here off an’ on for nigh twenty years past, an’ it hasn’t done me no harm. Don’t ye fash about them as lies under ye, or that doesn’ lie there either! It’ll be time for ye to be getting scart when ye see the tombsteans all run away with, and the place as bare as a stubble-field. There’s the clock, and’I must gang. My service to ye, ladies!’ And off he hobbled.