abode, close to the kennel. He loved to retire to it, and sleep near
his chosen companions, the hounds. When they were unkennelled, he
accompanied and ran with them afoot, and so sinewy and so swift was his
stunted form that he was very often in their midst at the death. Then,
with the brush of the fox elaborately disposed as the crest of his felt
hat, John would make his appearance on the following Sunday at church,
where it was displayed, and pompously hung up above his accustomed
seat, to his own great delight and the envy of many among the
congregation. When the pack found the fox, and the huntsman’s ear was
gladdened by their shrill and sudden burst into full cry, Black John’s
shout would be heard in the field, with his standing jest, “There they
go! there they go! like our missus at home in one of her storms!” As he
grew older, and less equal to the exertion of his strong and youthful
days, John took to wandering, gipsy-fashion, about the country-side;
and he found food and welcome at every cottage and farmhouse. His
usual couch was among the reeds or fern of some sheltering brake or
wood, and he slept, as he himself used to express it, “rolled up, as
warm as a hedgeboar, round his own nose.” One day, in bitter snowy
weather, he was found wanting from his accustomed haunts--“one morn
they missed him on the usual hill”--and after long search he was
discovered shrouded in snow, cold, stiffened, and to all outward
appearance dead. He was carried home, and in due course was coffined
and borne towards the grave. But there, just as the clergyman[59] who
read the service had reached the solemn words which commit the body
to the ground, a loud thumping noise was heard within the coffin.
The bystanders rent open the lid in hot haste, and up started Black
John alive, in amazement, and in furious wrath. He had been in a long
_deliquium_, or death-trance,[60] from cold, and had been restored to
life by the motion and warmth of his own funeral ride. As he told the
astonished mourners, “He heard the words ‘dust to dust,’ and then,”
said he, “I thought it was high time to bumpy.” His words passed into
a proverb; and to this very day, when Cornish men in these parts are
placed in some sudden extremity, and it becomes necessary to take
strong and immediate measures for extrication, the saying is, “It is
time to bumpy, as Black John said.” In his anger and mental confusion,
Black John ever after attributed his attempted burial to the conspiracy
and ill-will of the clergyman, whose words he had interrupted by his
sudden resurrection. More than once the reverend gentleman was suddenly
assaulted in his walks by a stone hurled at him from a hedge, followed
by an angry outcry, in a well-known voice, of “Ha! old Dust-to-dust;
here I be, alive and kicking!”
It may be easily believed that Black John was a very refractory subject
for clerical interference and admonition. The result of frequent
clerical attempts to reform his habits, was a rooted dislike on his
part of the black coat and white neckcloth in all its shades and
denominations. The visit of the first field-preacher to the precincts
of the Hall was signalised by an exhibition of this feeling. John
waylaid the poor unsuspecting man, and offered to guide him on his
road by a short cut across the park, which, John alleged, would save
him a “considerable bit of way.” The treacherous guide led him
along a narrow path into a paddock, wherein was shut up for safety
Mr. Arscott’s perilous favourite bull. This animal had grown up
from calf-hood the wanton but docile companion of Black John, whose
wonderful skill in taming all manner of wild animals had made the “sire
of the herd” so familiar with his strange warder, that he would follow
him and obey his signals and voice like a dog. What took place between
the bull and the preacher could only be guessed at.[61] A rush was
heard by a passer-by, and a yell; then the rustling of the branches
of a tree, and finally a dead thud upon the grass. From the paddock
gate some little time after emerged Black John with a fragment of a
white cravat in his hand, and this was all, so he steadfastly averred,
that ever he could find of “the preacher’s body.” Actually, it was the
sole relic of his arrival and existence that survived in those wild
parts. He was never heard of more in that region. And although there
were rural sceptics who doubted that the bull could have made such
quick work of a full-grown man, the story was fearful enough to scare
away all wandering preachers from that district while the dwarf lived.
On the Sunday following the terrific interview between the preacher
and the bull, John took his usual place in church, but, to the
astonishment of those who were not in the secret, instead of the usual
fox’s brush, a jaunty pennon of white rag floated as the crest of the
well-known felt hat.
Black John was long and fondly cherished by his generous master. Mr.
Arscott lived like Adam in the garden, surrounded by his animals and
pets, each with its familiar and household name; and no man ever more
fully realised the truth of the saying that “love makes love,” and that
the surest way to kindle kindness is to be kind. Accurately has it been
said of him--
“Oh, for the Squire! that shook at break of morn
Dew from the trees with echo of his horn!
The gathering scene, where Arscott’s lightest word
Went, like a trumpet, to the hearts that heard;
The dogs, that knew the meaning of his voice,
From the grim foxhound to my lady’s choice:
The steed that waited till his hand caressed:
And old Black John that gave and bare the jest!”[62]
None, high or low, during the lifetime of the squire, were allowed
with impunity to injure or harass his cross-grained jester, and many
a mischievous escapade was hushed up, and the sufferer soothed or
pacified by money or influence. When gout and old age had imprisoned
Mr. Arscott in his easy-chair, Black John snoozed among the ashes of
the vast wood fires of the hearth, or lay coiled upon his rug like
some faithful mastiff, watching every look and gesture of his master;
starting up to fill the pipe or the tankard of old ale, and then
crouching again.
“This lasted long; it fain would last
Till autumn rustled on the blast,”[63]
and the good old squire, in the language of the Tamar-side, “passed out
of it.” At his death and funeral, the agony of his misshapen retainer
was unappeasable. He had to be removed by force from the door of the
vault, and then he utterly refused to depart from the neighbourhood
of the grave. He made himself another lair, near the churchyard wall,
and there he sobbed away the brief remnant of his days, in honest and
unavailing grief for the protector whom he had so loved in life, and
from whom in death he would not be divided. Thus and there, not long
after, he died, as the old men of the parish used to relate, for the
“second and last time.” He had what is called in those parts a decent
funeral, for his master had bequeathed to him an ample allowance for
life and death in his last will. The mourners ate of the fat and drank
of the strong, as their Celtic impulses would suggest; and although
some among them, who remembered John’s former funeral, may have
listened again for a token or sign, poor Black John, alas for him! had
no master to come back to now, and declined “to bumpy” any more.
A singular and striking circumstance attended the final funeral of
Black John. An aged crone, bent and tottering, “worn Nature’s mournful
monument,” was observed following the bier, and the people heard her
muttering ever and anon, “Oh, is he really dead? He came to life again
once you know, and lived long after.” When assured that all indeed was
over, even her wild hope, she cried with a great sob, “O poor dear
Johnny! he was so good-looking and so steady till they spoilt him up
at the Hall!” Her words recalled her to the memory of some old men who
were there, and they knew her as a certain Aunty Bridget, who had been
teased and worried, long years agone, at markets and fairs, as “Black
John’s sweetheart.”
FOOTNOTES:
[55] From _All the Year Round_, vol. xiii. pp. 454-456. 1865.
[56] See Appendix C.
[57] Compare Hawker’s fine description of the feast at Dundagel in “The
Quest of the Sangraal”--
“Strong men for meat, and warriors at the wine,
They wreak the wrath of hunger on the beeves,
They rend rich morsels from the savoury deer,
And quench the flagon like Brun-guillie dew!”
[58] Another version of the story says that he was a shoemaker come on
business, and that he never made boots for Mr. Arscott again. For the
fate of the other toad, see end of Appendix C.
[59] The Rev. Robert Martyn, then Vicar of Stratton.
[60] On another occasion Black John awoke from a less serious trance.
The parson in his sermon was speaking of “that blessedness which on
earth it is impossible to find,” when a well-known voice from the
gallery shouted, “Not find! Us be sartain to find un to-morrow in
Swannacott Wood!”
[61] In another version of the tale, Black John said to the preacher,
“Only just take your hat off and say two words of gospel to ’im, and
her won’t touch ’ee.”
[62] This is one stanza from Hawker’s own poem, “Tetcott, 1831; in
which year Sir William Molesworth caused the old house to be taken
down, and a new one built.” (See Appendix C.)
[63] These lines are from Hawker’s poem, “A Legend of the Hive.”
DANIEL GUMB’S ROCK[64]
There is no part of our native country of England so little known, no
region so seldom trodden by the feet of the tourist or the traveller,
as the middle moorland of old Cornwall. A stretch of wild heath and
stunted gorse, dotted with swelling hills, and interspersed with
rugged rocks, either of native granite or rough-hewn pillar, the rude
memorial of ancient art, spreads from the Severn Sea on the west to the
tall ridge of Carradon on the east, and from Warbstow Barrow on the
north to the southern civilisation of Bodmin and Liskeard. Throughout
this district there is, even in these days, but very scanty sign of
settled habitation. Two or three recent and solitary roads traverse
the boundaries; here and there the shafts and machinery of a mine
announce the existence of underground life; a few clustered cottages,
or huts, for the shepherds, are sprinkled along the waste; but the
vast and uncultured surface of the soil is suggestive of the bleak
steppes of Tartary or the far wilds of Australia, and that in the very
heart of modern England. Yet is there no scenery that can be sought
by the antiquary or the artist that will so kindle the imagination or
requite the eye or the mind of the wanderer as this Cornish solitude.
If he travel from our storied Dundagel, eastward, Rowter,[65] the
Red Tor, so named from its purple tapestry of heather and heath, and
Brunguillie,[66] the Golden Hill, crested with yellow gorse like a
crown, will win his approach and reward, with their majestic horizon,
the first efforts of his pilgrimage. The summits and sides of these
mountains of the west are studded with many a logan-rock[67] or
shuddering-stone of the old superstition. This was the pillar of ordeal
in Druid times, so poised that while it shook at the slight faint touch
of the innocent finger, it firmly withstood the assailing strength of
the guilty man.
Passing onward, the traveller will pause amid a winding outline of
unhewn granite pillars, and he will gradually discover that these
are set up to represent the coils of a gigantic serpent, traced,
as it were, in stone. This is a memorial of the dragon-crest of a
Viking, or the demon-idol and shrine of an older antiquity. Not far
off there gleams a moorland lake or mimic sea, with its rippling laugh
of waters--the Dozmere Pool[68] of many an antique legend and tale,
the mystic scene[69] of the shadowy vessel and the Mort d’Arthur of
our living bard. A sheep-track--for no other visible path will render
guidance along the moor--leads on to Kilmarth Tor, from the brow of
which lofty crag the eye can embrace the expanse of the two seas which
are the boundaries of Cornwall on the right and left. There, too, looms
in the distance rocky Carradon, with the valley of the Hurlers at its
foot. These tall shapes of granite, grim and grotesque, were once,
as local legends say, nine bold upstanding Cornish men who disdained
the Sabbath-day; and as they pursued their daring pastime and “put
the stone” in spite of the warning of the priest, they were changed,
by a sudden doom, where they stood up to play, and so were fixed for
ever in monumental rock. Above them lowers the Devil’s Wring, a pile
of granite masses, lifted, as though by giant or demon strength, one
upon another; but the upper rocks vast and unwieldy, and the lower
gradually lessening downward, until they rest, poised, on a pivot of
stone so slender and small that it seems as though the wind sweeping
over the moor would overtopple it with a breath; and yet centuries
many and long have rolled over the heath, and still it stands unshaken
and unswerved. Its name is derived from the similitude of the rocky
structure to the press wherein the ancient housewives of rude Cornwall
were accustomed to “wring” out the milk from their cheese.
[Illustration: THE CHEESEWRING (or The Devil’s Wring).]
Not far off from this singular monument of “ages long ago” there is
found to this day a rough and rude assemblage of moorstone slabs,
some cast down and others erect, but manifestly brought together and
arranged by human hands and skill. There is still traceable amid the
fragments the outline of a human habitation, once divided into cells,
and this was the origin and purpose of this solitary abode. It was
the work and the home of a remarkable man--an eccentric and original
character among the worthies of the west--and the place has borne ever
since the early years of the last century the name of Daniel Gumb’s
Rock. He was a native Cornishman, born in a cottage that bordered on
the moor, and in the lowlier ranks of labouring life. In his father’s
household he was always accounted a strange and unsocial boy. In his
childhood he kept aloof from all pastime and play, and while his
companions resorted to their youthful amusements and sports, Daniel
was usually seen alone with a book or a slate whereon he worked, at a
very early age, the axioms of algebra or the diagrams of Euclid. He had
mastered with marvellous rapidity all the books of the country-side,
and he had even exhausted the instructions of the schoolmaster of the
neighbouring town. Then it became his chosen delight to wander on the
moors with some favourite volume in his hand, and a crust from his
mother’s loaf in his bag; with his inseparable tools, also, the chisel
and the mallet, wherewithal to chip and gather the geological specimens
of his own district. Often he would be absent whole nights, and when he
was questioned as to his place of shelter, he would reply, “Where John
the Baptist slept,” or “At Roche, in the hermit’s bed;” for the ruined
cell of a Christian anchorite stood, and yet stands, above the scenery
of the wanderings of that solitary boy.
But Daniel’s principal ambition was to know and name the planets
and the stars. It was at the time when the discoveries of foreign
astronomers had peopled the heavens with fresh imagery, and our
own Newton had given to the ethereal phenomena of the sky a “local
habitation and a name.” It is very striking to discover when the minds
of any nation are flooded with new ideas and original trains of
thought, how soon the strange tidings will reach the very skirts of the
population, and borne, how we know not, will thrill the hamlet and the
village with the wonders that have roused and instructed the far-off
and civilised city. Thus even Daniel’s distant district became aware
of the novel science of the stars, and this intelligence failed not to
excite and foster the faculties of his original mind. Local legends
still record and identify the tall and craggy places where the youthful
“scholar” was wont to ascend and to rest all night with his face turned
upward to the sky, “learning the customs of the stars,” and “finding
out by the planets things to come.” Nor were his studies unassisted
and alone. A master-mind of those days, Cookworthy[70] of Plymouth, a
learned and scientific man, still famous in the west, found out and
fostered the genius of the intelligent youth. He gave him access to
his library, and allowed him to visit his orrery and other scientific
instruments; and the result of this kindness was shown in the tastes
and future peculiarities of the mind of Gumb. The stern necessities
of life demanded, in the course of time, that Daniel should fulfil
the destiny of his birth, and win his bread by the sweat of his brow;
for the meagre resources of his cottage-home had to be augmented by
his youthful labour. In the choice of an occupation his early habits
were not without their influence. He selected the craft of a hewer of
stone, a very common calling on the surrounding moors; and there he
toiled for several years of his succeeding life, amid the cyclopean
models of the early ages. The pillared rocks of that wild domain were
the monoliths of Celtic history, and the vast piles of the native moor
were the heaped and unhewn pyramids of an ancient and nameless people.
All these surrounding scenes acted on his tastes and impulses. “So
the foundations of his mind were laid!” His father died, and Daniel
became his own master, and had to hew his way through the rugged world
by what the Cornish call “the pith of his bones.” That he did so his
future history will attest; but it was not unsoothed nor alone; nor
was it without the usual incident of human existence. No man ever yet
became happily great or joyfully distinguished without that kindling
strength, the affectionate presence of a woman.
“He who Joy would win,
Must share it: Happiness was born a twin.”
Such was the solace that arrived to soothe the dreary path of Daniel
Gumb. He wooed and won a maiden of his native village, who, amid the
rugged rocks and appellatives of Cornwall, had the soft Italian name
of Florence. But where, amid the utter poverty of his position and
prospects, could he find the peaceful and happy wedding-roof that
should bend over him and his bride? His friends were few, and they
too poor and lowly to aid his start in life. He himself had inherited
nothing save a strong head and heart, and two stalwart hands. He looked
around him and afar off, and there was no avenue for house or home.
Suddenly he recalled to mind his wandering days and his houseless
nights, the scanty food, the absorbing meditation, and the kindly
shelter of many a nook in the hollow places of the granite rock. He
formed his plan, and made it known to his future and faithful bride;
she assented with the full-hearted strength and trusting sacrifice of a
woman’s love. Then he went forth in the might of his simple and strong
resolve,--his tools in his scrip, and a loaf or two of his accustomed
household bread. He sought the well-known slope under Carradon,
searched many a mass of Druid rock, and paced around cromlech and
pillared stone of old memorial,[71] until he discovered a primeval
assemblage of granite slabs suited to his toil. One of these, grounded
upon several others, the vast boulders of some diluvian flood, had the
rude semblance of a roof. Underneath this shelving rock he scooped
away the soil, finding, as he dug on, more than one upright slice of
moorstone, which he left to stand as an inner and natural wall. At
last, at the end of a few laborious days, Daniel stood before a large
cavern of the rocks, divided into chambers by upstanding granite, and
sheltered at a steep angle by a mountainous mass of stone. Nerved and
sustained by the hopeful visions which crowded on his mind, and of
which he firmly trusted that this place would be the future scene,
he toiled on until he had finally framed a giant abode such as that
wherein Cyclops shut in Ulysses and his companions, and promised to
“devour No-man the last.” Materials for the pavement and for closing
up the inner walls were scattered abundantly around--nay, the very
furniture for that mountain-home was at once ready for his hand; for
as Agag,[72] king of the Amalekites, had his vaunted iron bed, so
did Gumb frame and hew for himself and Florence, his wife, table and
seat and a bedstead of native stone. Then he smoothed out and shot
into a groove a thick and heavy door, so that, closed like an Eastern
sepulchre, it demanded no common strength to roll away the stone. When
all had been prepared, the bridegroom and the bride met at a distant
church; the simple wedding-feast was held at her father’s house; and
that night the husband led the maiden of his vows, the bride of his
youth, to their wedding-rock! If he had known the ode, he might have
chanted, in Horatian[73] verse, that day--
“Nunc scio quid sit amor, duris in cotibus illum”
“Now know I what true love is; in rugged dens he dwells.”
Here the wedded pair dwelt in peace long and happy years, mingling
the imagery of old romance with the sterner duties of practical life.
As a far-famed hewer of stone, the skill and energy of this singular
man never lacked employ, nor failed to supply the necessities of his
moorland abode. Like a patriarch in his tent amid the solitudes of
Syria, he was his own king, prophet, and priest. He paid neither rent,
nor taxes, nor tithe. When children were born to him, he exercised
unwittingly the power of lay-baptism which was granted in the primitive
Church to the inhabitants of a wilderness, afar from the ministry of
the priesthood, and his wife was content to be “churched” by her own
cherished husband, among the altars of unhewn stone that surrounded
their solitary cell. Who shall say that this simple worship of the
father and the mother with their household, amid the paradise of hills,
was not as sweet, with the balsam of the soul, as the incense-breathing
psalm of the cathedral choir? Rightly or wrongly, it is known that
Daniel entertained an infinite contempt for “the parsons” whose
territories bordered on the moor. Not one of them, it was his wont to
aver, could cross the Asses’ Bridge of his favourite Euclid, a feat
he had himself accomplished in very early youth; nor could the most
learned among them all unravel the mysteries of his chosen companions,
the wandering stars that travelled over Carradon every night. Long
and frequent were his vigils for astronomical researches and delight.
To this day the traveller will encounter on the face of some solitary
rock a mathematical diagram carefully carved by some chisel and hand
unknown; and while speculation has often been rife as to the Druidical
origin of the mystic figure, or the scientific knowledge of the early
Kelts, the local antiquary is aware that these are the simple records
of the patient studies of Daniel Gumb.
When the writer of this article visited the neighbourhood in 183-,
there still survived relics and remembrances of this singular man.
There were a few written fragments[74] of his thoughts and studies
still treasured up in the existing families of himself and his wife.
Here is a transcript: “Mr. Cookworthy told me, when I saw him last,
that astronomers in foreign parts, and our great man Sir Isaac here at
home, had thought that the planets were so vast, and so like our earth
in their ways, that they might have been inhabited by men; but he said,
‘their elements and atmosphere are thought to be unfit for human life
and breath.’ But surely God would not have so wasted His worlds as to
have made such great bright masses of His creation to roll along all
barren, as it were, like desert places of light in the sky. There must
be people of some kind there: how I should like to see them, and to go
there when I die!”
Another entry on the same leaf: “Florence asked me to-day if I thought
that our souls, after we are dead, would know the stars and other
wise things better than we can now. And I answered her, Yes; and if I
could--that is, if I was allowed to--the first thing I would try should
be to square the circle true, and then, if I could, I would mark it and
work it out somewhere hereabouts on a flat rock, that my son might find
it there, and so make his fortune and be a great man. N.B.--Florence
asked me to write this down.”
On a thick sheet of pasteboard, with a ground-plan of a building on
the other side, he had written: “_January 16, 1756_.--A terrible storm
last night. Thunder and lightning and hail, with a tempest of wind. Saw
several dead sheep on the moor. Shipwrecks, no doubt, at sea. A thought
came into my mind, Why should such harm be allowed to be done? I read
some reasons once in a book that Mr. Cookworthy lent me, called ‘The
Origin of Evil;’ but I could not understand a word of it. My notion is,
that when evil somehow came into the world, God did not destroy it at
once, because He is so almighty that He let it go on, to make manifest
His power and majesty; and so He rules over all things, and turns them
into good at the last. N.B.--The devil is called in the Bible the
Prince of the Powers of the Air: so he may be, but he must obey his
Master. The poor wretch is but a slave after all!”