Old Trevarten: A Tale of the Pixies156
“Mount and follow! stout and cripple!
Horse and hattock, ‘but and ben;’157
Horses for the Pixie people,
Hattock for the Brownie men.”
R. S. Hawker.
People may talk if they please about the march of agriculture, and they may boast that by the discoveries of science a man will soon be able to carry into a large field enough manure for its soil in his coat-pocket, but there has been the ready answer, “Yes, and bring away the produce in his fob.” I am half inclined to agree with an old parishioner of mine, who used often to say, “It was an unlucky time for England when the phrase ‘gentleman farmer’ came up, and folks began to try their new-fangled plans—such as clover for horses and turnips for sheep.” “Rents,” he declared, “were never lower than when a tenant would pare and burn,158 and take their crops out of every field, so as to carry off the land as much as he brought on it”—a theory on which, being a renter himself, he had thriven, and put by money for full fifty years. Equally original, by the way, were the devices cherished by my aged friend for the repair of roads. When Macadam had driven his first turnpike through the West, a public dinner was given in honour of the event; and being presented with a free ticket, and well coaxed into the bargain, Old Trevarten made his appearance as a guest. But it was observed that, amid all the jingling of glasses and cheering of toasts, he sat motionless and mute, if not actually sulky. At length the engineer, somewhat piqued at his silence, said, during a pause, “Why, sir, I am afraid that I have not had the honour of gaining your approval in this undertaking of mine.”
“To tell you the truth, sir,” was the slow and sturdy answer, “I don’t like your road at all, by no means.”
“Well, but what are your reasons, sir, for disliking what most people are pleased with?”
“Why, sir, you have had a brave lot of money out of the country, and there’s nothing as I see to show for it—’tis all gone!”
“Gone, sir, gone! Why, bless me, isn’t there the road—the fine, wide, level road?”
“Well, yes, sartainly; but where’s they matereyals that cost such a sight of taxes? You’ve smashed mun to nort: there’s pilm [dust] in the drought, and there’s mucks [mud] in the rain, but nowt else that I see. Now, when I wor way-warden of Wide Widger, I let the farmers have something to show for their money. Why, sir, ’tis ten year agone come Candlemas that I wor in office for the ways, and I put down stones as big as beehives, and there they be now!”
Access to such a living volume of bygone usages and notions was an advantage not to be despised, and it was long my custom to resort to “mine ancient” for information difficult to be obtained elsewhere. Once “I do remember me” that I encountered him in the middle of a reedy marsh on his farm. He paused, and awaited my approach, leaning on his staff just where the path crossed a bed of the cotton-rush, then in full bloom. I had gathered a handful of the stalks, each with its pod of fine white gossamer threads, like a bunch of snowy silk.
“Ha!” said he, with a kind of half alarm, “you bean’t afeared to pick that there?”
“Afraid? No; why should I be?”
“Why, some people think it’s unlucky to carry off the pisky wool; but perhaps you know from the Scriptures how to keep off any harm.”
I did know better than to reason against such fancies with a Cornish yeoman of threescore and fifteen, and I thought it a good opening for a saw or ancient instance.159 “Pixies!” was my leading answer; “and who are they?”
“Ancient inhabitants,” was the grave reply—“folks that used to live in the land before us Christians comed here. So, at least, I’ve heerd my mother say. They are a small people.”
“And what about this wool? What use do they make of it.”
“Why, they spin it for clothing, and to keep ’em warm by night. They’d do a power of work for the farmers, and for a very small matter to eat and drink, too; and they would sing, evenings—sing and crowdie like a Christmas choir.”
The solemn tones of his voice, and the grim gravity of visage with which old Trevarten made known these mysteries, attested his own deep belief in their reality and truth. “Had I never seen those rings on the grass upon Hennacleave Hill—circles about a foot wide, of a darker colour than the rest of the turf?” he inquired, well knowing that I had, but rather rejoicing in an opportunity of enlightening me with scientific revelations of his own. “Did I know how they came there, and who made them?”
“No.”
“Well, that was surprising: he thought that the college teached such things, or why did it cost so much money to go there to learn? Howsomever, he would let me know about they rings. The piskies made mun, dancing hand-in-hand by night. They rise about midnight, and they put on their Sunday clothes, and they agree to meet in such or such a spot, and there one will crowdie and the others daunce, and beat out the time with their feet, till they’ve worn the shape of a round-about in the grass, and nort will wear out that ring for evermore!”
Deeply grateful for this information, I ventured to inquire, “And did you ever see any of these pixy people yourself?”
“Why, I can’t say for sartain that I didno seed mun; my mother hath—so I’ve yeerd her tell divers times. No; but I’ve seed their works, such as tying up the manes of the colts in stirrups for riding by night, and terrifying the cows into the clover till they wor jist a bosted with the wet grass. And I’ve been pisky-eyed more than once coming home from the market or fair; and I’ve yeerd mun at their rollicking night-times frayquently, but I can’t say that I ever seed their faytures, so as to know ’em again another time.”
“Well,” said I, as a sort of closing and clenching remark, “all I can say is that I wish I could lay hold of one of these pixies, just to look at—that’s all.”
“Do you?” was his quick rejoinder; “do you really desire it? I daresay I can oblige you one day. It is not a month agone that I’d all but catched one.”
“Indeed!” said I, half bewildered. “How? Where was it?”
“Why, sir, you see the case was this. I’d a bin to Simon Jude fair, and I stayed rather latish settling with the jobber Brown for some sheep, and so it wor past twelve o’clock at night before I come through Stowe wood; and just as I crossed Combe Water, sure enough I yeerd the piskies. I know’d very well where their ring was close by the gate, and so I stopped my horse and got off. Well, on I croped afoot till there was nothing but a gap between me and the pisky ring, and I could hear every word they said. One had got the crowder, and he was working away his elbow to the tune of ‘Green Slieves’ bravely, and the rest wor dauncing and singing and merrymaking like a stage-play. It made me just ’mazed in my head to look at ’em. Well, I thort to myself, if I could but catch one of these chaps to carry home! I’ve yeerd that there’s nothing so lucky in a house as a tame pisky. So I stooped down and I picked up a stone, oh, as big as my two fistes, and I swinged my arm and I scrashed the stone right into the ring. What a screech there was! Such a yell! and one in pertickler I yeerd screaming and hopping with a leg a-brok like a drashel. That one I was pretty sure of. But still, as it was very late, and my wife would be looking for me home, and it was dark also, so I thout I might as well come down and fetch my pisky in the morning by daylight. Well, sure enough, soon as I rose, I took one of these baskets with a cover that the women have invented—a ridicule, they call it—and down I goes to the ring. And do you know, sir, they’d a be so cunning—they’d a had the art for to carry their comrade clear off, and there wasn’t so much as a screed of one left! But, however,” said my venerable friend, seeing that I did not look quite satisfied with the evidence, “however, there the stone was that I drashed in amongst mun!”
Alas! alas! how often in after-days, when I have encountered the theories of men learned in the ’ologies, and pondered the prodigious inferences which they had deduced from a stratum here and a deposit there,—how irresistibly have my thoughts recurred to old Trevarten and his amount of proof, “There the stone was that I drashed in amongst mun”!