ep and
intricate were the creases in her brown skin; and the broad outlines of
her features were massive and strong. At the end of the last century she
had been a strapping girl with a fine gait, and she liked to tell how
the young Squire used to admire her, and how he stopped his horse and
spoke with her by the wayside. The young Squire had grown into an old
man, but Mary always remembered him as he was when he cantered through
the village on his croptailed roadster, and displayed his brass buttons
and his neat buckskins for the admiration of the fisher-girls. No one
knew how old Mary was: she herself fixed her age at "about a thousand,"
but even those who believed in her most regarded this estimate as
exaggerated. She always spoke of the Squire as being younger than
herself, and as she was still living when he was within five years of
one hundred, she must have been very old indeed. Her chance allusions to
past events were startling. She could remember the talk of her own
grandmother, and when she repeated things which she had heard as a
child, it seemed as though a dim light had been thrown on antiquity. She
liked to speak about a mysterious French privateer that had landed men
who "went and set up their gob to old Mrs. Turnbull at the Bleakmoor
Farm, and tyok every loaf oot o' the pantry;" but no one could ever tell
what privateer she meant. She had heard about Bonaparte, and she
remembered when Big Meg, the village cannon, was brought down to the
cliff and planted ready for invaders. Her grandmother had spoken often
of the time when all the men from the Ratcliffe property, away west, had
followed somebody that wanted to send the King away, but Mary's
knowledge of this circumstance was severely indefinite. The lads in the
place would have followed their Squire had he chosen to imitate
"Ratcliffe," but the Squire of that day was a quiet man who liked the
notion of keeping his head on his shoulders. Mary knew of one country
beyond England, and she conceived that Englishmen were meant to thrash
the inhabitants of that country on all possible occasions: beyond this
her knowledge of Europe and the globe did not extend. Her function in
the village was that of story-teller, and her house was a place of
meeting for all the lads. She taught aspiring youths to smoke, and this
harmful educational influence she supplemented by teaching her pupils
many wild stories of a ghostly character. Her own sons had been four in
number; one