Baring-Gould relates another
personal anecdote, this time concerning himself one
night at a tavern:
I was sitting
in a little seaport tavern in Cornwall one
winter's evening, over a great fire, with a
company of old 'salts,' gossiping, yarning,
singing, when up got a tough old fellow with a
face the color of mahagony, and dark, piercing
eyes, and the nose of a hawk. Planting his feet
wide apart, as though on deck in a rolling sea,
he began to sing in stentorian tones a folk-song
relative to a highway-man in the old times, when
Mr. John Fielding, the blind magistrate at
Westminster, put down highway robbery.
The ballad told
of the evil deeds of this mounted robber of the
highways, and of how he was captured by
'Fielding's crew' and condemned to die. It
concluded:--
When I am dead, born to my grave,
A gallant funeral may I have;
Six highwaymen to carry me,
With good broad swords and sweet liberty.
"Six blooming maidens shall bear
my pall,
Give them white gloves and pink ribbons all;
And when I'm dead they'll tell the truth,
I was a wild and a wicked youth.
At the
conclusion of each verse the whole assembly
repeated the two final lines. It was a striking
scene; their eyes flashed, their color mounted,
they hammered with their fists on the table and
with their heels on the floor. Some, in the
wildness of their excitement, sprang up, thrust
their hands through their white or grey hair, and
flourished them, roaring like bulls.
When the song
was done, and composure had settled over the
faces of the excited men, one of them said
apologetically to me, "You see, sir, we be
all old smugglers, and have gone agin the law in
our best days."
Baring-Gould, A
Book of Cornwall, pages
269-270.)
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