It was Tom who paid a poet from Brighton to write the lines for the tombstone, which we all thought were very true and good, beginning —

“Alas!  Swift flew the fatal lead
Which pierced through the young man’s head. 
He instantly fell, resigned his breath,
And closed his languid eyes in death.”

There was more of it, and I dare say it is all still to be read in
Patcham Churchyard.

One day, about the time of our Cliffe Royal adventure, I was seated in the cottage looking round at the curios which my father had fastened on to the walls, and wishing, like the lazy lad that I was, that Mr. Lilly had died before ever he wrote his Latin grammar, when my mother, who was sitting knitting in the window, gave a little cry of surprise.

“Good gracious!” she cried.  “What a vulgar-looking woman!”

It was so rare to hear my mother say a hard word against anybody (unless it were General Buonaparte) that I was across the room and at the window in a jump.  A pony-chaise was coming slowly down the village street, and in it was the queerest-looking person that I had ever seen.  She was very stout, with a face that was of so dark a red that it shaded away into purple over the nose and cheeks.  She wore a great hat with a white curling ostrich feather, and from under its brim her two bold, black eyes stared out with a look of anger and defiance as if to tell the folk that she thought less of them than they could do of her.  She had some sort of scarlet pelisse with white swans-down about her neck, and she held the reins slack in her hands, while the pony wandered from side to side of the road as the fancy took him.  Each time the chaise swayed, her head with the great hat swayed also, so that sometimes we saw the crown of it and sometimes the brim.

“What a dreadful sight!” cried my mother.

“What is amiss with her, mother?”

“Heaven forgive me if I misjudge her, Rodney, but I think that the unfortunate woman has been drinking.”

“Why,” I cried, “she has pulled the chaise up at the smithy.  I’ll find out all the news for you;” and, catching up my cap, away I scampered.

Champion Harrison had been shoeing a horse at the forge door, and when I got into the street I could see him with the creature’s hoof still under his arm, and the rasp in his hand, kneeling down amid the white parings.  The woman was beckoning him from the chaise, and he staring up at her with the queerest expression upon his face.  Presently he threw down his rasp and went across to her, standing by the wheel and shaking his head as he talked to her.  For my part, I slipped into the smithy, where Boy Jim was finishing the shoe, and I watched the neatness of his work and the deft way in which he turned up the caulkens.  When he had done with it he carried it out, and there was the strange woman still talking with his uncle.

“Is that he?” I heard her ask.