“I don’t know who you may be, sir, but—”
“You are kind enough to excuse my rising to
introduce myself. My name is Zebedee Minards.”
YOUNG ZEB FETCHES A CHEST OF DRAWERS.
The parish of Ruan Lanihale is bounded on the west
by Porthlooe, a fishing town of fifteen hundred inhabitants
or less, that blocks the seaward exit of a narrow
coombe. A little stream tumbles down this coombe
towards the “Hauen,” divides the folk into
parishioners of Lanihale and Landaviddy, and receives
impartially the fish offal of both. There is
a good deal of this offal, especially during pilchard
time, and the towns-folk live on their first storeys,
using the lower floors as fish cellars, or “pallaces.”
But even while the nose most abhors, the eye is delighted
by jumbled houses, crazy stairways leading to green
doors, a group of children dabbling in the mud at low
tide, a congregation of white gulls, a line of fishing
boats below the quay where the men lounge and whistle
and the barked nets hang to dry, and, beyond all,
the shorn outline of two cliffs with a wedge of sea
and sky between.
Mr. Zebedee Minards the elder dwelt on the eastern
or Lanihale side of the stream, and a good way back
from the Hauen, beside the road that winds inland
up the coombe. Twenty yards of garden divided
his cottage door from the road, and prevented the
inmates from breaking their necks as they stepped
over its threshold. Even as it was, Old Zeb had
acquired a habit of singing out “Ware heads!”
to the wayfarers whenever he chanced to drop a rotund
object on his estate; and if any small article were
missing indoors, would descend at once to the highway
with the cheerful assurance, based on repeated success,
of finding it somewhere below.
Over and above its recurrent crop of potatoes and
flatpoll cabbages, this precipitous garden depended
for permanent interest on a collection of marine curiosities,
all eloquent of disaster to shipping. To begin
with, a colossal and highly varnished Cherokee, once
the figure-head of a West Indiaman, stood sentry by
the gate and hung forward over the road, to the discomfiture
of unwarned and absent-minded bagmen. The path
to the door was guarded by a low fence of split-bamboo
baskets that had once contained sugar from Batavia;
a coffee bag from the wreck of a Dutch barque served
for door-mat; a rum-cask with a history caught rain-water
from the eaves; and a lapdog’s pagoda—a
dainty affair, striped in scarlet and yellow, the
jetsom of some passenger ship—had been
deftly adapted by Old Zeb, and stood in line with three
straw bee-skips under the eastern wall.
The next day but one after Christmas dawned deliciously
in Porthlooe, bright with virginal sunshine, and made
tender by the breath of the Gulf Stream. Uncle
Issy, passing up the road at nine o’clock, halted
by the Cherokee to pass a word with its proprietor,
who presented the very antipodes of a bird’s-eye
view, as he knocked about the crumbling clods with
his visgy at the top of the slope.
