While travelling along the Norfolk coast, and enjoying its golden sands
and bracing breezes, I fell in with a jolly old fellow who was mending
one of the huge oaken breakwaters, with which some parts of this
wind-swept coast are protected, to prevent the encroachment of the sea,
which, year by year and slice by slice, devours the soft clay cliffs,
as regularly and insatiably as a ploughboy consumes his thumbpiece
after the first two hours of morning work.
The jolly one had charge of a gang of half-a-dozen semi-amphibious
agricultural labourers, who were driving down the great iron-shod
piles deep into the sand, by means of an erection very similar in
construction to a guillotine, except that instead of the lunette a huge
block of iron weighing several hundredweight fell upon the pile to be
driven when a lever is pulled.
The men, with whom I conversed while they ate their noonday meal, were
of the usual type of tawny-bearded, brown-faced, straight-nosed men one
sees on the east coast, who, when not employed in farm work, gain their
scanty living on the sea. But the ganger was a man of a different
stamp; he was short and thick like a Shetland pony, and very nearly as
rugged and unkempt as one of those sturdy animals, for his iron-grey
beard and hair blew about in the wind like the tattered rags on a
mawkin.
He was a most jocular little-big man, full of fun and funny sayings,
and the loudest to laugh at his own jokes was--himself. His laugh was
hearty at any time, but on special occasions he would give a peculiar
roar that would quite startle any person not used to Billy Flowerdue’s
wild guffaw.
I invited Billy to spend an evening in my caravan, an invitation which
he readily accepted, as he was some miles from his home, and only at
present lodging in the inn of a neighbouring village.
Billy opened his eyes at many of the curiosities I had picked up during
my travels, and widest of all at a curious piece of work which had
been made by a man in the same line of business as himself--that of a
carpenter and wheelwright. It was a wooden leg, which had been made for
a cow, and which the animal had worn for several years, until she met
her death by lightning.
It was a curious contrivance made of two pieces of wood, jointed at the
knee with a pair of ordinary iron hinges, and made to fly out straight
when the animal arose from a recumbent position, by means of thick
india-rubber springs attached from the upper to the lower timbers.
If the powerfully-built little carpenter opened his eyes wide at what
he was pleased to call “that thayer cur’us contraption,” he did so even
more fully when I asked him to allow me to send him to sleep by a
peculiar power I possessed, and I quite believe he thought I was either
insane, bent on robbing him, or else thirsting for his blood.
I had, therefore, to fully explain the meaning of hypnotism to Billy,
who, although a masterful hand with the adze or chisel, had apparently
no brain for other subjects. His head was full of chips and timber,
and nothing more. By dint of persevering persuasion, he was at length
prevailed upon to permit me to place him in a state of trance, but
not until I had first placed my faithful collie “Skybo” in a mesmeric
sleep; at the sight of which Billy laughed loudly enough to make the
plates and crockery in my house on wheels rattle again.
I had no need to ask Billy to give up his mind, and allow himself to
think of just nothing at all, for it appeared a chronic state with him,
to which he relapsed after every laugh. When he did enter the trance
state he related the following very curious adventure of his early days.