thither; and to this and his stern hard rule and stealthy secret
management (as much as to good luck and place) might it be attributed
that scarcely any but themselves had dreamed about this Exmoor mine.

As for me, I had no ambition to become a miner; and the state to which
gold-seeking had brought poor Uncle Ben was not at all encouraging. My
business was to till the ground, and tend the growth that came of it,
and store the fruit in Heaven's good time, rather than to scoop and
burrow like a weasel or a rat for the yellow root of evil. Moreover, I
was led from home, between the hay and corn harvests (when we often have
a week to spare), by a call there was no resisting; unless I gave up all
regard for wrestling, and for my county.

Now here many persons may take me amiss, and there always has been some
confusion; which people who ought to have known better have wrought into
subject of quarrelling. By birth it is true, and cannot be denied,
that I am a man of Somerset; nevertheless by breed I am, as well as by
education, a son of Devon also. And just as both of our two counties
vowed that Glen Doone was none of theirs, but belonged to the other
one; so now, each with hot claim and jangling (leading even to blows
sometimes), asserted and would swear to it (as I became more famous)
that John Ridd was of its own producing, bred of its own true blood, and
basely stolen by the other.

Now I have not judged it in any way needful or even becoming and
delicate, to enter into my wrestling adventures, or describe my
progress. The whole thing is so different from Lorna, and her gentle
manners, and her style of walking; moreover I must seem (even to kind
people) to magnify myself so much, or at least attempt to do it, that I
have scratched out written pages, through my better taste and sense.

Neither will I, upon this head, make any difference even now; being
simply betrayed into mentioning the matter because bare truth requires
it, in the tale of Lorna's fortunes.

For a mighty giant had arisen in a part of Cornwall: and his calf was
twenty-five inches round, and the breadth of his shoulders two feet
and a quarter; and his stature seven feet and three-quarters. Round the
chest he was seventy inches, and his hand a foot across, and there were
no scales strong enough to judge of his weight in the market-place. Now
this man--or I should say, his backers and his boasters, for the giant
himself was modest--sent me a brave and ha