Chapter I. The First Ship.
Chapter II. The Second Ship.
Chapter III. The Stranger.
Chapter IV. Young Zeb fetches
a Chest of Drawers.
Chapter V. The Stranger Dances
in Young Zeb’s Shoes.
Chapter VI. Siege is Lad to
Ruby.
Chapter VII. The “Jolly
Pilchards”
Chapter VIII. Young Zeb Sells
His Soul.
Chapter IX. Young Zeb Wins
His Soul Back.
Chapter X. The Third Ship.
A BLUE PANTOMIME.
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
THE DISENCHANTMENT OF ELIZABETH.
The first ship.
In those west-country parishes where but a few years
back the feast of Christmas Eve was usually prolonged
with cake and cider, “crowding,” and “geese
dancing,” till the ancient carols ushered in
the day, a certain languor not seldom pervaded the
services of the Church a few hours later. Red
eyes and heavy, young limbs hardly rested from the
Dashing White Sergeant and Sir Roger,
throats husky from a plurality of causes—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 decade of the century, this languor was
neither more nor less apparent than usual inside the
small parish church of Ruan Lanihale, although Christmas
fell that year on a Sunday, and dancing should, by
rights, have ceased at midnight. The building
stands high above a bleak peninsula on the South Coast,
and the congregation had struggled up with heads slanted
sou’-west against the weather that drove up the
Channel in a black fog. Now, having gained shelter,
they quickly lost the glow of endeavour, and mixed
in pleasing stupor the humming of the storm in the
tower above, its intermittent onslaughts on the leadwork
of the southern windows, and the voice of Parson Babbage
lifted now and again from the chancel as if to correct
the shambling pace of the choir in the west gallery.
“Mark me,” whispered Old Zeb Minards,
crowder and leader of the musicians, sitting back
at the end of the Psalms, and eyeing his fiddle dubiously;
“If Sternhold be sober this morning, Hopkins
be drunk as a fly, or ’tis t’other way
round.”
