“For God’s sake shut your mouth, you horrible old man!” burst out Martin, as Phoebe hurried away in tears and Chris followed her.  “You’re a disgrace to humanity and I don’t hesitate—­I don’t hesitate at all to say you have no proper feeling in you!”

“Martin’s right, Billy,” declared Mr. Lyddon without emotion.  “You ’m a thought tu quick to meet other people’s troubles half way, as I’ve told ’e before to-night.  Ban’t a comely trait in ’e.  You’ve made her run off sobbing her poor, bruised heart out.  As if she hadn’t wept enough o’ late.  Do ‘e think us caan’t see what it all means an’ the wisht cloud that’s awver all our heads, lookin’ darker by contrast wi’ the happiness of the land, owing to the Jubilee of a gert Queen?  Coourse we knaw.  But’t is poor wisdom to talk ’bout the blackness of a cloud to them as be tryin’ to find its silver lining.  If you caan’t lighten trouble, best to hold your peace.”

“What’s the use of cryin’ ‘peace’ when us knaws in our hearts ’tis war?  Us must look inside an’ outside, an’ count the cost same as I be doin’ now,” declared Mr. Blee.  “Then to be catched up so harsh ’mong friends!  Well, well, gude-night, all; I’ll go to my rest.  Hard words doan’t break, though they may bruise.  But I’ll do my duty, whether or no.”

He rose and shuffled to the door, then looked round and opened his mouth to speak again.  But he changed his mind, shook his head, snorted expressively, and disappeared.

“A straange-fashioned chap,” commented Mrs. Blanchard, “wi’ sometimes a wise word stuck in his sour speech, like a gude currant in a bad dumpling.”

CHAPTER XVIII

THE NIGHT OF JUBILEE

Unnumbered joy fires were writing the nation’s thanksgiving across the starry darkness of a night in June.  Throughout the confines of Britain—­on knolls arising beside populous towns, above the wild cliffs of our coasts, in low-lying lands, upon the banks of rivers, at the fringes of forests and over a thousand barren heaths, lonely wastes, and stony pinnacles of untamed hills, like some mundane galaxy of stars or many-tongued outbreak of conflagration, the bonfires glimmered.  And their golden seed was sown so thickly, that from no pile of those hundreds then brightening the hours of darkness had it been possible to gaze into the night and see no other.

Upon the shaggy fastnesses of Devon’s central waste, within the bounds, metes, and precincts of Dartmoor Forest, there shone a whole constellation of little suns, and a wanderer in air might have counted a hundred without difficulty, whilst, for the beholders perched upon Yes Tor, High Wilhays, or the bosom of Cosdon during the fairness and clearness of that memorable night, fully threescore beacons flamed.  All those granite giants within the field of man’s activities, all the monsters whose enormous shades fell at dawn or evening time upon the hamlets and villages of the