The Reverend Mr. Glennie wrote the verses, and I knew them by heart, for he had given me a copy; indeed, the whole village had rung with the tale of David’s death, and it was yet in every mouth.  He was only child to Elzevir Block, who kept the Why Not? inn at the bottom of the village, and was with the contrabandiers, when their ketch was boarded that June night by the Government schooner.  People said that it was Magistrate Maskew of Moonfleet Manor who had put the Revenue men on the track, and anyway he was on board the Elector as she overhauled the ketch.  There was some show of fighting when the vessels first came alongside, of one another, and Maskew drew a pistol and fired it off in young David’s face, with only the two gunwales between them.  In the afternoon of Midsummer’s Day the Elector brought the ketch into Moonfleet, and there was a posse of constables to march the smugglers off to Dorchester Jail.  The prisoners trudged up through the village ironed two and two together, while people stood at their doors or followed them, the men greeting them with a kindly word, for we knew most of them as Ringstave and Monkbury men, and the women sorrowing for their wives.  But they left David’s body in the ketch, so the boy paid dear for his night’s frolic.

’Ay, ‘twas a cruel, cruel thing to fire on so young a lad,’ Ratsey said, as he stepped back a pace to study the effect of a flag that he was chiselling on the Revenue schooner, ’and trouble is likely to come to the other poor fellows taken, for Lawyer Empson says three of them will surely hang at next Assize.  I recollect’, he went on, ’thirty years ago, when there was a bit of a scuffle between the Royal Sophy and the Marnhull, they hanged four of the contrabandiers, and my old father caught his death of cold what with going to see the poor chaps turned off at Dorchester, and standing up to his knees in the river Frome to get a sight of them, for all the countryside was there, and such a press there was no place on land.  There, that’s enough,’ he said, turning again to the gravestone.  ’On Monday I’ll line the ports in black, and get a brush of red to pick out the flag; and now, my son, you’ve helped with the lantern, so come down to the Why Not? and there I’ll have a word with Elzevir, who sadly needs the talk of kindly friends to cheer him, and we’ll find you a glass of Hollands to keep out autumn chills.’

I was but a lad, and thought it a vast honour to be asked to the Why Not?—­for did not such an invitation raise me at once to the dignity of manhood.  Ah, sweet boyhood, how eager are we as boys to be quit of thee, with what regret do we look back on thee before our man’s race is half-way run!  Yet was not my pleasure without alloy, for I feared even to think of what Aunt Jane would say if she knew that I had been at the Why Not?—­and beside that, I stood in awe of grim old Elzevir Block, grimmer and sadder a thousand times since David’s death.