It was usually over birds if ever Parson Trehawke quarrelled with his parishioners.  Few of them attended his services, but they spoke well of him personally, and they reckoned that he was a fine old boy was Parson.  They would not however abandon their beastly habit of snaring wildfowl in winter with fish-hooks, and many a time had Mark seen his grandfather stand on the top of Pendhu Cliff, a favourite place to bait the hooks, cursing the scattered white houses of the village below as if it were one of the cities of the plain.

Although the people of Nancepean except for a very few never attended the services in their church they liked to be baptized and married within its walls, and not for anything would they have been buried outside the little churchyard by the sea.  About three years after Mark’s arrival his grandfather had a great fight over a burial.  The blacksmith, a certain William Day, died, and although he had never been inside St. Tugdual’s Church since he was married, his relations set great store by his being buried there and by Parson Trehawke’s celebrating the last rites.

“Never,” vowed the Parson.  “Never while I live will I lay that blackguard in my churchyard.”

The elders of the village remonstrated with him, pointing out that although the late Mr. Day was a pillar of the Chapel it had ever been the custom in Nancepean to let the bones of the most obstinate Wesleyan rest beside his forefathers.

“Wesleyan!” shouted the Parson.  “Who cares if he was a Jew?  I won’t have my churchyard defiled by that blackguard’s corpse.  Only a week before he died, I saw him with my own eyes fling two or three pieces of white-hot metal to some ducks that were looking for worms in the ditch outside his smithy, and the wretched birds gobbled them down and died in agony.  I cursed him where he stood, and the judgment of God has struck him low, and never shall he rest in holy ground if I can keep him out of it.”

The elders of the village expressed their astonishment at Mr. Trehawke’s unreasonableness.  William Day had been a God-fearing and upright man all his life with no scandal upon his reputation unless it were the rumour that he had got with child a half lunatic servant in his house, and that was never proved.  Was a man to be refused Christian burial because he had once played a joke on some ducks?  And what would Parson Trehawke have said to Jesus Christ about the joke he played on the Gadarene swine?

There is nothing that irritates a Kelt so much as the least consideration for any animal, and there was not a man in the whole of the Rhos peninsula who did not sympathize with the corpse of William Day.  In the end the dispute was settled by a neighbouring parson’s coming over and reading the burial service over the blacksmith’s grave.  Mark apprehended that his grandfather resented bitterly the compromise as his fellow parson called it, the surrender as he himself called it.  This was the