“He’m a monkey that hath seen the world, no doubt,” said Merryweather Chugg, the water-bailiff.

“Yes—an’ brought back some nuts wi’ gold kernels, by all accounts,” answered Noah Sage; “though he ban’t going to crack none here, I reckon, for the chap’s only come to have a look at the home of his youth; then he’m off again to foreign parts.”

The two old men sat in the parlour of the “Bellaford” Inn at Postbridge, and about them gathered other labouring folk. All were inhabitants of the Dartmoor district, and most had been born and bred in the valley of East Dart or upon adjacent farms. This village, of which the pride and glory is an old bridge that spans the river, shall be found upon the shaggy breast of the Moor, like an oasis in the desert; for here much land has been snatched from the hungry heath, groves of beech and sycamore lie in the bosom of these undulating wastes, and close at hand are certain snug tenement farms whereon men have dwelt and wrestled with the wild land from time immemorial.

To-day a native had returned to his home; and as a vacant room at the “Bellaford” Inn well served his purpose, Mr. Robert Bates secured it for a fortnight, that he might wander again about his boyhood’s haunts and shine a little in the eyes of those who still remembered him. That night he had promised to relate his experiences in the public bar; he had also let it be known that upon this great occasion beer and spirits would flow free of all cost for old friends and new.

“He’ll have to address a overflowed meeting, like a Member of Parliament,” said Michael French, the Moor-man, “for be blessed if us can all get in your bar, Mrs. Capern.”

“Lots of room yet,” she said, “if you’d only turn some of they boys out-of-doors. They won’t drink nought, so I’d rather have their room than their company.”

“I should think you was oncommon excited to see this chap, ban’t you?” asked Noah Sage of a very ancient patriarch in the corner. “It was up to Hartland Farm, when you was head man there, that Bob Bates comed as a ’pretence from Moreton Poorhouse, if I can remember.”

“Ess fay, ’tis so,” said the other. “You ax un if the thrashings I used to give un every other day for wasting his time weern’t the makin’ of un; an’ if he ban’t a liar, he’ll say ’twas so. If he owes thanks to any man, ’tis to old Jacob Pearn—though I say it myself.”“That’s the truth, an’ I’ll allow every word of it, Jacob; an’ I’m terrible glad you ban’t dead, for you were the first I meant to see come to-morrow.”

Mr. Bates himself spoke. He was a small, wiry man of fifty or thereabout. His clothes were well cut, and he wore a gold watch-chain. His face and hands were tanned a deep brown; his hair was grizzled, and his beard was also growing grey at the sides. His eyes shone genially as he grasped a dozen hands in turn, and in turn answered twice a dozen salutations.

Robert Bates had run away from the heavy hand of Gaffer Pearn some five and thirty years before the present time, and he looked round him now and saw but one familiar face; for the old men had passed from their labours, the middle-aged had taken their places, his former mates were growing grey and he could not recognise them.

“I’ll tell you the whole tale if you’m minded,” he said. “’Tis thirty years long, but give two minutes to each of they years an’ I’ll finish in a hour. An’ meantime, Mrs. Capern—as was Nancy Bassett, an’ wouldn’t walk out Sundays with me last time I seed ’e—be so good as to let every gen’leman present have what he wants to drink, for I be going to leave ten pounds in Postbridge, an’ I’d so soon you had it as anybody.”

Great applause greeted this liberal determination.“You’m an open-handed chap, wherever you’ve comed from,” said Merryweather Chugg, “an’ us all drinks long life an’ good health to you an’ yours, if so be you’m a family man.”

“I’ll come to that,” answered Mr. Bates. “Let me sit by the fire, will ’e? I do love the smell of the peat, an’ where I come from, us don’t trouble about fires, I assure ’e, for a body can catch heat from the sun all the year round.”

“You was always finger-cold in winter,” said Mr. Pearn. “I mind as a boy your colour never altered from blue in frosty weather, an’ you had a chilblain wheresoever a chilblain could find room for itself.”

“’Tis so; an’ when I runned away to mend my fortune, ’twas the knowledge that a certain ship were sailing down to the line into hot weather as made me go for a sailor. To Plymouth docks I went when I ran off, an’ there met a man at the Barbican as axed me to come for cabin-boy; an’ when he said they was going where the cocoanuts comed from, I said I’d go.”

“My dear life!” murmured Mrs. Capern,—“to think what little things do make or mar a fortune!”

“’Tis so;—a drop of rum cold, mother, then I’ll start on my tale. An’ I may as well say that every word be true, for Providence have so dealt by me that to tell a falsehood is the last thing ever I would do.”“Not but what you used to lie something terrible when you was young, Bob,” said Mr. Pearn, from the corner.

“I know it, Jacob,” answered the traveller; “an’ hard though you hit, you never hit hard enough to cure me of lying. ’Tis a damned vice, an’ I never yet told a fib as paid for telling. But ’twasn’t you cured me; ’twas a man by the name of Mistley, the bo’sun of the ship I sailed in. I told un a stramming gert lie, an’ he found it out, an’—well, if you want to know what a proper dressing-down be, you ax a seafaring man to lay it on. In them days they didn’t reckon they’d begun till they’d drawed blood out of ’e; an’ so often as not they’d give ’e a bucket of salt water down your back arter, just so as you shouldn’t forget where they’d been busy. One such hiding I got from Mistley, an’ never wanted another. I’d so soon have told that man a second lie as I’d told God one to His shining face. An’ long after, to show I don’t bear no malice, when I fell on my feet, I went down to the port when my old ship comed in again two years later, an’ in my pocket was five golden pounds for Mistley. Only he’d gone an’ died o’ yellow jack in the meantime down to the Plate, so he never got it. An’ you boys there, remember what I say, an’ never tell no lies if you want to get on an’ pocket good wages come presently. ’Tis more than thirty years ago, an’ the man that did it dust; yet I wriggles my shoulders an’ feels the flesh crawl on my spine to this day when I thinks of it.

“But I’m gwaine too fast, for I haven’t sailed from Plymouth yet. Us went off in due course, an’ I seed the wonders of the deep, an’ I can’t say I took to ’em; but there—I’d gone for a sailor, an’ a sailor I thought ’twould have to be. Us got to a place by name of Barbados in the West Indies presently—Bim for short. A flat pancake of an island, with not much to tell about ’cept that there’s only a bit of brown paper between it an’ a billet I hope none of us won’t never go to. Hot as—as need be, no doubt; but there was better to come, for presently we ups anchor an’ away to St. Vincent—a place as might make you think heaven couldn’t be better; an’ then down to Grenada, another island so lovely as a fairy story; an’ then Trinidad—where the Angostura bitters comes from, Mrs. Capern—an’ then a bit of a place by name of Tobago, as you could put down on Dartymoor a’most an’ leave some to double up all round. Yet, ’pon that island, neighbours, I’ve lived my life, an’ done my duty, I hope, an’ got well thought upon by black, white an’ brindled; for in them islands I should tell you the people be most every shade you could name but green. Butter-coloured, treacle-coloured, putty-coloured, saffron-coloured, peat-coloured, an’ every colour; an’ sometimes, though a chap may have the face of a nigger—lips an’ nose an’ wool an’ all—yet he’ll be so white as a dog’s tooth; an’ you know there’s blood from Europe hid in him somewheres. They’m a mongrel people; yet they’ve got souls—just as much as they Irish-Americans; an’ God He knows if they’ve got souls, there’s hope for everything—down to a scorpion. My own wife, as I’ve left out in Tobago with my family—well, I wouldn’t go for to call her black; an’ for that matter I knocked a white man off the wharf to Scarborough in Tobago, who did say so; but you folks to home—I dare swear you’d think her was a thought nigger-like, owing to a touch of the tar-brush, as we call it, long ways back in her family history. But as good a woman—wife an’ mother—as ever feared God an’ washed linen. A laundress, neighbours—lower than me by her birth, so my master said; then I laughed in his face, an’ told un I was a workhouse boy as couldn’t name no father but God A’mighty. A nice little bungy, round-about woman, wi’ butivul black eyes, an’ so straight in her vartue as a princess. Never a man had no better wife, an’ her’d have come to see old Dartymoor along with me but for my family, as be large an’ all sizes.

“Well, to Tobago it was that, lending a hand to help lade a Royal Mail Steam Packet as comed in—just to make a shilling or two while we was idle, I got struck down. Loading wi’ cocoanuts an’ turtle her was; an’ ’twould make you die o’ laughin’, souls, to have seen them reptiles hoisted aboard by their flippers. No laughing matter for them though, poor twoads, because, once they’m catched by moonlight ’pon the sandy beaches there, ’tis a very poor come-along-of-it for ’em. Not a bit more food do they have, but just be shipped off home in turtle-troughs an’ make the best weather they can. Us had a stormy journey back last fortnight, an’ I knowed by the turtle-soup o’ nights that the creatures were dying rapid an’ somebody had made a bad bargain. But if you gets the varmints home alive, they be worth a Jew’s eye.

“Suddenly, helping in a shore barge, I went down as if somebody had fetched me a clout ’pon top the head; an’, when I came to, there was doctor from shore an’ the dowl to pay. ’Twas days afore I could get about, an’ my ship couldn’t wait, an’ no work for me nowhere ’cept odd jobs. Then they told me I was a D.B.S., which means a Distressed British Seaman, an’ I found as I’d have to wait for next steamer that comed to ship me off. But I weren’t very down-daunted ’bout it, for, since I’d seen the size of the earth, I’d growed bigger in the mind a bit, an’ I ate my food an’ smoked my pipe an’ thanked God that I was alive to try again.“Then, trapesing about one afternoon, footsore like and tired of trying to get something to do on the sugar estates, I climbed over a wall into a bit of shade, an’ sat me down under some cocoa trees to rest. I confess I did get over a wall, which is a thing you can’t often do without making trouble except on old Dartymoor. An’ there I was with the mountains around—all covered to their topmost spurs wi’ wonnerful forest, and the Caribbean Sea stretched blue as blue underneath. Such a jungle of trees an’ palms laced together with flowering vines as you’ve never dreamed of. Trumpet flowers, an’ fire-red flamboyants, an’ huge cactuses, an’ here an’ there a lightning-blasted, gert tree towering stark white above all the living green. An’ king-birds an’ humming-birds twinkling about in the air like women’s rings an’ brooches, an’ lizards so big as squirrels a-scampering upon the ground, an’ tree-frogs in the trees, an’ fireflies spangling the velvet-black nights. An’ no dimpsy light, neither at dawn nor even, for the moment sun be down ’tis night, an’ moment he be up again ’tis morning. You can see un climb straight out o’ the sea as if he was rolling up a ladder.

“I sat there in the shade, an’ at my very hand what should I find but a ripe pomegranate? ’Tis a fruit as you folks haven’t met with outside the Bible, I reckon, yet a real thing, an’ very nice to them as like it. Packed tight wi’ seeds, the colour of the heather, wi’ a bitter-sweet taste to it as be very refreshing to the throat. Such a fruit I picked without ‘by your leave,’ an’ chewed at un, an’ looked at the butivul blue sea down-under, an’ talked to myself out loud, as my manner always was.

“‘Well, Bob Bates,’ I sez, ‘you be most tired o’ caddling about doing nought, ban’t you? Still, you’m a lucky chap, whether or no; for a live D.B.S. be a sight better’n a dead cabin-boy. ’Twill larn ’e to treat the sun less civil. Don’t do for to cap to him in these parts. But you keep up your heart an’ trust in the Lord, as Mistley told ’e. He’ll look to ’e for sartain in His own time.’

“Then I heard a curious ristling alongside in the bush, an’ catched sight of a pair o’ cat-like eyes on me. ’Course I knowed there wasn’t no savage beasts there, but I didn’t know as there mightn’t be savage men, an’ I was going to get back over thicky wall an’ run for it. But too late. They was human eyes, wi’ a human nose atop an’ a human moustache under, but a very comical fashion of face an’ a queerer than ever I’d seen afore or have since.

“’Tis hard for me to call home exactly what Matthew Damian looked like then, for ’tis above thirty year ago, an’ that man filled my eye every day, winter an’ summer, for twenty years. Yet, though he looks different now, with all I know behind my mind’s eye as I see him, then he ’peared mighty strange, wild an’ shaggy. A face like a round shot he had, but a terrible deep jaw under the ear. A little chin, round eyes—grey-green—an’ ears standing sharp off a close-cropped head, wi’ hair pepper-an’-salt colour. A huge, tall man, an’ his beard was cut to his chin, an’ his moustache stuck out like a bush five inches to port an’ starboard. Well, I was mortal feared, for I’d never seen nothing like un outside a nightmare; yet his voice was so thin as a boy’s, an’ piped like a reed in his thick throat. He had the nigger whine, too—as I dare say you may mark on my tongue now, after my ears have soaked in it so long.

“He stared an’ I stared. Then he spoke. ‘You come along with me,’ he said in a Frenchy sort of English.

“‘Why for?’ I said; then I thought I seed his eyes ’pon the pomegranate. ‘Very sorry, sir, if this here be yours,’ I said; ‘but I’m baggered if a chap can tell what be wild an’ what ban’t on this here ridicklous island. ’Tis like a gentleman’s hothouse broke loose,’ I said to un.

“‘No matter about that,’ he said.

“‘I can give ’e my knife,’ I told un, ‘if you must have payment; but that be all I’ve got in the world ’cept the things I stand up in, an’ I’d a deal rather keep it.’“‘I do not want your knife,’ he answers. ‘I want you.’

“‘Well, I’m going cheap, I do assure ’e,’ I said, thinking I’d try how a light heart would serve me. But I weren’t comfortable by a long way, ’cause there’s a lot of madness in them islands, an’ I thought as this chap might be three-halfpence short of a shilling, as we say. However, he was too busy thinking to laugh at my poor fun, an’ for that matter, as I found after, he never laughed easy,—nor talked easy for that matter. Now he fell silent, an’ I walked by him. Then, after a stretch through a reg’lar Garden of Eden, wi’out our first parents, us comed upon a lovely house, whitewashed home to the roof—like snow in all that butivul green. ’Pon sight of it the man spoke again.

“‘I want you to talk to my mother,’ he said suddenly. ‘You’ll just talk and talk in an easy way, as you was talking to yourself when I found you.’

“‘I be only a sailor-man, wi’ nought to say to a lady,’ I told him.

“‘No matter for that,’ he said. ‘Just talk straight on. It do not signify a bit what you say, so you speak natural. In fact, talk to my mother as if madame was your own mother.’

“So then, of course, I reckoned the cat-faced chap was out of his mind—as who wouldn’t have?

“To a great verandah we comed, all crawled over with the butivulest white flowers the sun draws the scent from; an’ there, in a cane chair, sat an ancient lady—lady, I say, though you might have reckoned she was an old brown lizard by the look of her. Old ban’t the word for her. Time’s self would have looked a boy alongside her, if the picture-books be true. A great sunbonnet was over her head, an’ a frill under, an’ just a scanty thread or two of white hair peeping from that. A face all deep lines where the years had run over it; bright eyes peeping from behind great gold spectacles, an’ hands—my word! like joints of an old apple tree. Her was that homely too! A dandy-go-risset gown her wore, an’ a bit of knitting was in her hands, an’ a good book, wi’ very large print, ’pon a table beside her, an’ a li’l nigger gal waved a fan to keep the flies away.

“I took my hat off an’ made a leg; then her son spoke: ‘Sit down there beside her and talk loud, and pretend with yourself that Madame Damian is your grandmother. Don’t try to use fine words; and remember this: if you do rightly as I bid you, you shall never repent this day as long as you live.’

“I was all in a maze, I do assure ’e; but I just reckoned obedience was best, an’ went at her with one eye on my gentleman, for fear as he should change his mind.

“‘Well, my old dear,’ I said, ‘I be very pleased to meet ’e, an’ I do like to have a tell with ’e very much, if you’ll pardon a rough sailor-man. An’ I hopes you’ll put in a word with this here big gen’leman for me, ’cause I’ve eat one of his pomegranates unbeknownst-like, though I’m shot if I’d have touched un come I’d known ’twasn’t wild. An’ to tell ’e gospel, I be in a jakes of a mess as ’tis—far from my home an’ not a friend in the world that I know of.’

“Dallybuttons! To see that ancient woman! When I beginned to talk, her dropped her knitting, as if there was a spider in it, an’ sat up an’ stared out of her bead-black eyes. Though ’twas a fiery day, I went so cold as a frog all down my spine to see her glaze so keen.

“‘Go on,’ she said in a funny old voice, ‘go on, young man, will ’e? Tell about where you comed from, please.’

“There! it did sound mighty familiar to hear her, an’ no mistake!

“‘My heart! You’m West Country too!’ I cried out.

“Her nodded, but her couldn’t speak another word.

“‘Go on, go on talking to her,’ the man said.

“So I sailed on.

“‘You must know I runned off to sea, ma’am, from a farm down Dartymoor way. ’Tis a terrible coorious sort of a place, an’ calls for hard work if you wants to thrive there. Roots will do if you’m generous with stable stuff an’ lime, but corn be cruel shy, except oats. I was a lazy boy, I’m afraid, an’ got weary of being hit about like a foot-ball, though I deserved it; an’ I thought to mend my life by running away. The things I’ve seed! Lor’-amercy! ’tis a wonnerful world, sure enough, ma’am.’

“‘So it be,’ she said, very soft, ‘an’ a wonnerful God made it, my dear. Go on, go on about the Dartymoors, will ’e?’

“‘Well,’ I said, ‘’tis a gert, lonesome land, all broke up wi’ rocky tors, as we call ’em, an’ clitters o’ granite where the foxes breed, an’ gashly bogs, in which you’m like to be stogged if you don’t know no better. An’ the cots be scattered over the face of it, an’ the little farms do lie here an’ there in the lew corners, wi’ their new-take fields around about. There’s a smell o’ peat in the air most times, an’ it do rise up very blue into the morning light. An’ the great marshes glimmer, an’ the plovers call in spring; an’ the ponies, wi’ their little ragged foals, go galloping unshod over the Moor. Then the rivers an’ rills twinkle every way, like silver an’ gold threads stretching miles an’ miles; an’ come summer the heather blows an’ the great hills shine out rosylike an’ butivul; an’—oh, my old dear—oh, ma’am—’ I says, breaking off, ‘doan’t ’e—doan’t ’e sob so—doan’t ’e take on like that, for I wouldn’t bring a wisht thought to ’e for money.’

“This I said ’cause the old ancient’s lips shook, an’ her bright eyes fell a-blinking, an’ great tears rolled down. Then she put her hands over her face an’ bowed over ’em.

“‘My God!’ said the chap, half to hisself, ‘this is the first time my mother have wept to my sight; an’ I am sixty years old!’

“But of course a Devonshire woman wouldn’t cry afore a Frenchman, even if he was her son.

“Come presently she cheered up. ‘Do ’e knaw a place by the name of Postbridge, my boy?’ she says.

“‘I did ought to, ma’am,’ I sez; ‘’twas from Hartland Farm I runned.’

“She sighed a gert sigh. ‘Hartland!’ she says, as if the word was a whole hymn tune to her.

“‘There’s a church, an’ a public, there now,’ I said.

“‘An’ the gert men of renown? Parson Mason, an’ Mr. Slack, an’ Judge Buller, an’ Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt?’ she axed me.

“‘Never heard tell of none of them,’ I said.

“‘Course not,’ old lady answers. ‘Why—why, I forgot I be ninety-four. They heroes was all dead afore your faither an’ mother were born.’

“‘As to them,’ I tells her—‘as to my faither an’ mother, ma’am, there’s a manner of grave doubt, for I’m a workhouse boy, wi’out any havage that be known.’

“But her had fallen to dreaming.

“‘Tell about the in-country,’ she said all of a sudden. ‘My mother comed from down Totnes way.’

“So I tells about the South Hams, an’ the farms, an’ the butivul apple-blooth, as creams out over the orchards in spring, an’ all the rest of it.

“There, I talked myself dry an’ no mistake; an’ she nodded an’ nodded an’ laughed once; an’ it set her off coughing, an’ ’frighted her son terrible.

“Then, after I’d been chittering for a month of Sundays, as it seemed to me, the day ended and it comed on dark, an’ she got up to go.

“‘Keep un here,’ she says to the man. ‘For God’s love doan’t ’e let un go. Pay un anything he axes for to stop.’

“She went off very slow, wi’ a nigger to support her at each elbow, an’ a fine young brown woman to look after her. An’ I was took in the kitchen, an’ had such a bellyful of meat an’ drink as minded me of Christmas up to Hartland Farm in the old days.

“Then the chap—he lets me into the riddle of it all. You see his mother was Farmer Blake’s darter—the first as ever saved land in these parts, an’ rented from the Duchy more’n a hundred years agone now. An’ when Princetown was made for a prison to hold the French us catched in the wars, there comed a Monseer Damian among the prisoners. Him an’ many other gents the authorities let out on parole, as they say; an’ he made friends with Farmer Blake, an’ falled in love with Margery Blake. An’ when war was done, if he didn’t marry her all correct an’ snatch her away to foreign parts! Martinique was left to the French, an’ he took her to that island first, then to Trinidad, which be ours, then to Tobago, which be also ours. There the man prospered, an’ growed sugar, an’ did very flourishing, an’ comed to be first an’ richest party in the island. But smallpox took him in middle life, an’ it took all his children but his eldest son, Matthew Damian. He bided with his mother, an’ married a French woman from Guadeloupe.

“An’ ’twas old lady’s hope an’ prayer for seventy year to hear good Devon spoke again some day. Her only got to hunger terrible for the old country when her childer an’ her husband died, by which time she was too old to travel home again. An’ the Postbridge Blakes had all gone dead ages afore; an’ in truth there couldn’t have been a soul on Dartymoor as remembered her. Of course her son knowed the sound of the speech, from hearing his mother, as never lost it; an’ when he catched me telling to myself, his first thought was for her.“’Twas meat an’ drink to her, sure enough; an’ meat an’ drink to me too, for that matter, because I never left the Man-o’-War Bay Sugar Estate no more. Very little work I done at first, for old Mrs. Damian would have me keep on ’bout home every afternoon in the verandah; but six months after I comed there she died, happy as a bird; an’ if I wasn’t down for fifty pound in her will!

“Richest people in Tobago, they was; an’ then I settled to work for Matthew Damian, an’ when he died, seventeen year after, the head man was pensioned off, an’ I got the billet under Matthew Damian’s son, who be my master now. An’ there I’ll work to the end, an’ my childern after me, please the Lord.”

“’Tis a very fine tale, Mr. Bates, if I may speak for the company,” said Merryweather Chugg; “an’ it do show what a blessing it be to come out of Devonshire. If you’d been a foreigner, now, none of these good things would have happened to ’e.”

“I mind my faither telling about Farmer Blake an’ how he helped to carry his coffin to Widecombe soon after I was born,” said Gaffer Pearn.

“For my part,” declared the landlady, “my mind be all ’pon that poor old blid, as went away from these parts in her maiden days. To think, after seventy years of waiting, that she should hear a Devonshire tongue again! I lay it helped her to pass in peace.”

“It did so,” declared the returned native. “She went out of life easy as a babby; for her appeared to see all her own folks very clear just afore she died, an’ she was steadfast sure as there’d be a West-Country welcome waitin’ up-along. Fill your glasses, my dears; an’ give they boys some ginger-beer, ma’am, will ’e?”