considering the ignorance of the people here, and the tendency to superstition inherent in human nature. But why it should have been revived now, I cannot imagine.”
Mr. Bitterworth and Jan had walked on. The vicar touched Lionel on the arm, not immediately to follow them.
“Mr. Verner, I do not hold good with the policy which seems to prevail, of keeping this matter from you,” he said, in a confidential tone. “I cannot see the expediency of it in any way. It is not Rachel Frost’s ghost that is said to be terrifying people.”
“Whose then?” asked Lionel.
“Frederick Massingbird’s.”
Lionel paused, as if his ears deceived him.
“Whose?” he repeated.
“Frederick Massingbird’s.”
“How perfectly absurd!” he presently exclaimed.
“True,” said Mr. Bourne. “So absurd that, were it not for a circumstance which has happened to-night, I scarcely think I should have brought myself to repeat it. My conviction is, that some person bearing an extraordinary resemblance to Frederick Massingbird is walking about to terrify the neighbourhood.”
“I should think there’s not another face living that bears a resemblance to Fred Massingbird’s,” observed Lionel. “How have you heard this?”
“The first to tell me of it was old Matthew Frost. He saw him plainly, believing it to be Frederick Massingbird’s spirit—although he had never believed in spirits before. Dan Duff holds to it that he saw it; and now Alice Hook: besides others. I turned a deaf ear to all, Mr. Verner; but to-night I met one so like Frederick Massingbird that, were Massingbird not dead, I could have sworn it was himself. It was wondrously like him, even to the mark on the cheek.”
“I never heard such a tale!” uttered Lionel.
“As I said—until to-night. I assure you the resemblance is so great that if we have all female Deerham in fits, I shall not wonder. It strikes me—it is the only solution I can come to—that some one is personating Frederick Massingbird for the purpose of a mischievous joke—though how they get up the resemblance is another thing. Let me advise you to see into it, Mr. Verner.”
They were turning round in front, waiting, and the vicar hastened on. Leaving Lionel glued to the spot where he stood.
ST. COLUMB AND THE NORTH-WEST COAST OF CORNWALL.
St. Columb,—in the language of the “Universal Gazetteer,” to which I have referred,—is a market town in the north-western district of Cornwall; “a place somewhat decayed and fallen now, though in ancient times of more than considerable importance.” “It takes its name (it would appear) from that Virgin of Sennes in Gallia,” Martyr of the Primitive Church, about A.D. 300, whose story, though omitted by Mrs. Jameson, in her volumes of “Sacred and Legendary Art,” may be found “enshrined in any of the old French books of the Saints.” I may add, perhaps, as of my own knowledge, that it is a very beautiful story; nor wanting (as very few of these stories are) in a deep meaning of its own; or, at all events, some moral, useful enough for every day purposes, which those who will seek for themselves, may easily find out.
It is probably out of respect for the legend above referred to, in commemoration of “the sacred bird” itself—the celestial carrier pigeon, not to speak profanely, who “comforted the maiden as she lay a-dying from hunger and thirst,”—bringing her messages, so it is said, from heaven, and beating “both at morn and eventide,” with pure white wings against her prison bars,—that the inhabitants of this little town cherish so many of the ornithological family of the Columbidæ among their household pets. I noted the fact as we entered it along the Bodmin road, one afternoon in the month of August last. I noted it less pleasantly, and in a less philosophical spirit of quiet observation, when my slumbers were broken in upon at an early hour on the following morning, by a low monotonous murmur, sounding in my ears, and repeated with dreary iteration over and over again, the origin of which, for a moment or two, I could not make out. But when I did, you may be sure that I thought it rather an additional aggravation of my discomfort, than otherwise, to remember that the murmur in question should be spoken of in poetry, as the “sweet voice” of the stock-dove, and elsewhere as “the pigeon’s soothing call.”
We had been to Castle-an-Dinas the day before—I, and the inevitable fellow tourist without whom I never travel. We had passed I know not how many hours, taking it out of ourselves after the most approved fashion: clambering about Cornish rocks and tolmens, and up and down Cornish hills: anon falling down steep places, and picking ourselves up again, and exhausting ourselves, by various adventures, along the Cornish roads.
This Castle-an-Dinas, you must know, is an old intrenched camp, with the ruins of a fortress or keep, in the neighbourhood of St. Columb. It is well worth a visit, if for no other reason, at all events because the common tradition of the country-side has associated it with the name of the Laureate’s hero:—
The selfless man, and stainless gentleman,
