Squire used to admire her, and how he stopped his horse and spoke with her by the wayside.  The young Squire had grown into an old man, but Mary always remembered him as he was when he cantered through the village on his croptailed roadster, and displayed his brass buttons and his neat buckskins for the admiration of the fisher-girls.  No one knew how old Mary was:  she herself fixed her age at “about a thousand,” but even those who believed in her most regarded this estimate as exaggerated.  She always spoke of the Squire as being younger than herself, and as she was still living when he was within five years of one hundred, she must have been very old indeed.  Her chance allusions to past events were startling.  She could remember the talk of her own grandmother, and when she repeated things which she had heard as a child, it seemed as though a dim light had been thrown on antiquity.  She liked to speak about a mysterious French privateer that had landed men who “went and set up their gob to old Mrs. Turnbull at the Bleakmoor Farm, and tyok every loaf oot o’ the pantry;” but no one could ever tell what privateer she meant.  She had heard about Bonaparte, and she remembered when Big Meg, the village cannon, was brought down to the cliff and planted ready for invaders.  Her grandmother had spoken often of the time when all the men from the Ratcliffe property, away west, had followed somebody that wanted to send the King away, but Mary’s knowledge of this circumstance was severely indefinite.  The lads in the place would have followed their Squire had he chosen to imitate “Ratcliffe,” but the Squire of that day was a quiet man who liked the notion of keeping his head on his shoulders.  Mary knew of one country beyond England, and she conceived that Englishmen were meant to thrash the inhabitants of that country on all possible occasions:  beyond this her knowledge of Europe and the globe did not extend.  Her function in the village was that of story-teller, and her house was a place of meeting for all the lads.  She taught aspiring youths to smoke, and this harmful educational influence she supplemented by teaching her pupils many wild stories of a ghostly character.  Her own sons had been four in number; one of them survived as an old one-armed man; the others were drowned.  But when Mary got her little school of listeners about her, she said it made her feel “as if Tom and the other bairns were back agyen.”  Smart lads used to leave the village and come back after many days with flat caps and earrings, and a sailorly roll.  Mary would say, “That should be Harry’s Tommy, by the voice.  Is that so, hinny?” and when Harry’s Tommy answered “Yes,” Mary would say, “Your awd pipe’s on the top o’ the oven; sit thee doon and give us your cracks.”  Mary’s pupils all had pipes which were kept on the oven-top for them, and she was much distressed if she found that anyone smoked a pipe belonging to a lad who had been drowned.  When the school gathered in the