The Maid of Sker quotes

I am but an ancient fisherman upon the coast of Glamorganshire, with work enough of my own to do, and trouble enough of my own to heed, in getting my poor living.

Yet no peace there is for me among my friends and neighbours, unless I will set to and try—as they bid me twice a-day perhaps—whether I cannot tell the rights of a curious adventure which it pleased Providence should happen, off and on, amidst us, …

and hence provision may be found for the old age and infirmities, now gaining upon me, every time I try to go out fishing.

In this encouragement and prospect I have little faith, knowing how much more people care about what they eat than what they read.

Nevertheless I will hope for the best, especially as my evenings now are very long and wearisome; and I was counted a hopeful scholar, fifty years agone perhaps, in our village school here—not to mention the Royal Navy;

Then upon one hook I fixed a soft crab, and on the other a cuttlefish. There were lugworms also in my pot, but they would do better after dark, when a tumbling cod might be on the feed.

Good-luck and bad-luck has been my lot ever since I can remember; sometimes a long spell of one, wing and wing, as you might say, and then a long leg of the other.

But never in all my born days did I have such a spell of luck in the fishing way as on that blessed 10th of July 1782.

But, bless my heart, when the light boat glided buoyantly up to my very feet, and the moon shone over the starboard gunwale, and without much drawback I gazed at it—behold! the little craft was laden with a freight of pure innocence!

All for captain, crew, and cargo, was a little helpless child.

In the stern-sheets, fast asleep, with the baby face towards me, lay a little child in white. Something told me that it was not dead, or even ailing; only adrift upon the world, and not at all aware of it.

“

I ’ont ky, I ’ont, I tell ’a.

’Ee see if I does now, and ma say hot a good gal I is.”

What I had seen that night upset me more than I like to dwell upon. But with all my fish on hand, I was forced to make the best of it.

For a downhearted man will turn meat, as we say, and much more, fish, to a farthing’s-worth.

And though my heart was sore and heavy for my ancient sweetheart Moxy, and for little Bardie in the thick of such disasters, that could be no excuse to me for wasting good fish—or at least pretty good—and losing thoroughly good money.

There I had been, for several hours, ready to prove anything, but never challenged by anybody; and my spirit had grown accordingly. But I never yet have found it wise to overlie success.

Win it, and look at it, and be off, is the quickest way to get some more.

So I scarcely even called so much as a pint at the Cat and Snuffers, to have a laugh with Griffy;

I did for his Honour all I could, although his manner of speech was not in any way to my liking. But my rule has always been that of the royal navy, than which there is no wiser.

If my equal insults me, I knock him down; if my officer does it, I knock under.

Meanwhile our people were muttering “Sassenach, Sassenach!” And from their faces it was plain that they did not like an Englishman to sit upon Cymric bodies. However, it was the old, old thing. The Welsh must do all the real work;

Meanwhile our people were muttering “Sassenach, Sassenach!” And from their faces it was plain that they did not like an Englishman to sit upon Cymric bodies. However, it was the old, old thing.

The Welsh must do all the real work; and the English be paid for sitting upon them after they are dead.

“I never sat on a black man yet, and I won’t sit on a black man now,” the Coroner said, when he was sure about oats enough for his pony; “I’ll not disgrace his Majesty’s writ by sitting upon damned niggers.”

“Ickle bother go to ’e back pit-hole? Does ’a think, old Davy?”

This was more than I could tell, though inclined to think it very likely.

However, before I could answer, some of the jury followed us, and behind them the Coroner himself;

When such a matter is over and done with, surely no man, in common sense, has a right to reopen the question.

The time to find fault with a fish, in all conscience, is before you have bought him.

Having once done that, he is now your own; and to blame him is to find fault with the mercy which gave you the money to buy him. A foolish thing as well;

These little things, when thinking thus, or having thought flow through them, never ought to be disturbed, because their brains are tender. The unknown stream will soon run out, and then they are fit again for play, which is the proper work of man.

We open the world, and we close the world, with nothing more than this; and while our manhood is too grand (for a score and a half of years, perhaps), to take things but in earnest, the justice of our birth is on us⁠—we are fortune’s plaything.

“None of your stinking stuff!” and so on. But now they ran down beautifully, and looked up under their eyelids at me, and left me to show them what I liked, and never beat down a halfpenny, and even accepted my own weight.

Such is the grand effect of glory; and I might have kissed every one of them, and many even of the good plain cooks, if I could have reconciled it with my sense of greatness.

And I knew that she did love pastry rarely; for one day, after a fine pair of soles, I said to the two children, “Now, put your little hands together, and thank God for a good dinner.”

Bunny did this in a grateful manner, but Bardie said, “No, I ’ont, old Davy; I’ll thank God when I gets puddeny-pie.”

Upon the whole, I concluded thus, that the little creature was after all (and as might have been expected with any other child almost) too young, in the third year of her age, to maintain any clear ideas of place, or time, or names, or …

And this kind will, instead of being at all repressed by discouragement, increases tenfold in proportion as others manifest any unkind desire to keep themselves out of the way of it.

My certy, no low curiosity is this, but lofty sympathy.

My grandfather nine generations back, Yorath the celebrated bard, begins perhaps his most immortal ode to a gentleman who had given him a quart of beer with this noble moral precept:

For the time, I knew not how I felt, or what it was that vanquished me; only that my spirit owned this man’s to be its master. Whether from excess of goodness, or from depth of desperate evil, at the time I knew not.

It was the most wondrous unfathomable face that ever fellow-man fixed gaze upon; lost to mankindliness, lost to mercy, lost to all memory of God.

As handsome a face as need be seen, with a very strong forehead and coal-black eyes, a straight white nose, and a sharp-cut mouth, and the chin like a marble sculpture. Disdain was the first thing it gave one to think of;

lost to mankindliness, lost to mercy, lost to all memory of God. As handsome a face as need be seen, with a very strong forehead and coal-black eyes, a straight white nose, and a sharp-cut mouth, and the chin like a marble sculpture.

Disdain was the first thing it gave one to think of; and after that, cold relentless humour; and after that, anything dark and bad.

Meanwhile this was a very handsome man, as women reckon beauty; and his age not over forty, perhaps; also of good average stature, active and elegant form, and so on. Neither years nor cubits make much odds to a man of that sort;

All this small-talk almost vexed me more than the content it gave. Every now and then I could see the man in these little corner views, but they did not show me round him so as to get his girth and substance.

“Think of the devil,” is an old saying; and while I thought of him, in he walked.

At the very first glimpse of him, all those people who had been talking so freely about him shrank away, and said, “Servant, sir!” and looked so foolish more than usual, that he read them with one eye.

I gave him his time to consider it out; but the trouble seemed only to grow on him, until he laid down his whip and said, not being able to do any more,

“Horses is horses, and pigs is pigs, every bit the same as men be men. If the Lord made ’em both, the devil had the right to take ’em both.”

This was so sound in point of reasoning, as well as of what we do hear in church, that never another word could I say, being taken in my own shallowness.

I felt almost as much amiss as if I were in an evil dream of being chased through caves of rock by some of my very best customers, all bearing red-hot toasting forks, and pelting me with my own good fish.

It is the very worst dream I have, and it never comes after a common supper; which proves how clear my conscience is.

And even now I might have escaped, because there were side passages;

I have seen too much of the tricks of the world to believe in anything supernatural; but the granting of this power is most strictly within nature’s scope; and somebody must have it.

One man has the gift of love, that everybody loves him; another has the gift of hate, that nobody comes near him; the third, and far the rarest gift, combines the two others (one more, one less), and adds to them both the gift of fear.

I felt, as I tried to meet his gaze and found my eyes quiver away from it, that the further I kept from this man’s sight, the better it would be for me.

And I could answer for it, even with disdainful Chowne looking down through me, that nothing larger than a rowboat could have made for Narnton Court. But I have not said much of the river as yet; and who can understand me?

This river bends in graceful courtesies to the sweet land it is leaving, and the hills that hold its birth.

Also with a vein of terror at the unknown sea before it, back it comes, when you grieve to think that it must have said “goodbye” forever.

That Parson Chowne should dare to think that I would swallow such stuff as that, made me angry with myself for not having contradicted him. But all this time I was very wise, and had no call to reproach myself.

Seldom need any man repent for not having said more than he did; and never so needeth a Welshman.

And now, though I still took observation of Narnton Court (as in honour bound to deserve my salary), and though the Parson still rode down, and went the round of the deck at times when nobody could expect him;

and the strength of his eyes was coming back, and the bitter disdain of his countenance. The devil, who wanted him for a rare morsel in the way of cannibalism, stood at my elbow; but luckily thought it sweeter not to hurry it.

The foulest man on all God’s earth, who made a scoff of mercy’s self, lay at my mercy for a minute, defied it, took it, and hated it.

For the sake of myself, I let him go. For the sake of mankind, I should have slain him.

but luckily thought it sweeter not to hurry it. The foulest man on all God’s earth, who made a scoff of mercy’s self, lay at my mercy for a minute, defied it, took it, and hated it.

For the sake of myself, I let him go. For the sake of mankind, I should have slain him.

He had nothing to be robbed off, neither had he enemy; as for soul, he never yet had heard of any such ownership. But an unknown latitude of terror overpowered him.

Nothing leads a man like fear; and this poor savage, though so naked, was a man of some sort.

Therefore, although he would far liefer have skulked off in the crannying shadows, leaving the moon to see to it, he could by no means find the power to withdraw himself like that.

He was perhaps a little scant of humour and of quickness; which two things give more offence to the outer world that has them not, than the longest course of rigid business carried on without them.

I have seen a man who could not crack nuts fly into a fury with one who could.

And these reflections made me even yet more anxious to serve him, so grave, and calm, and simple-minded, and so patient was his face.

… to them), and who had picked up bits of Welsh, for an access to my heart in all its patriotism, there was not one worth looking at, or fit to be a landlady, who took the trouble to come near me, in the frosty weather.

When a man is forsaken by the world, he must have recourse to reason.

And if only borne up thereby, and with a little cash in hand, he can wait till the world comes round again. This was my position now. I never had behaved so well in all my life before, I think; though always conscientious.

Nothing vexed me now so much as to hear from private people, and even from the public sailors, that the nation wanted peace.

No nation ever should want peace, until it has thoroughly thrashed the other, or is bound by wicked luck to knock under hopelessly.

And neither of those things had befallen England at this period. But I have not skill enough to navigate in politics. And before we had been long at sea, we spoke a full-rigged ship from Hamburg, which had touched at Falmouth;

It was to be naked (like Parson Chowne’s folk), but with the girls at the well stirred up to make it more becoming. And then Mother Jones was to go to Sker, and in my name present it.

All things fail, unless a man himself goes and looks after them.

And so my £5 note did; and when I was able to follow it, complaint was too late, as usual.

and if Roger chose to give me an inventory of goods and chattels, he can bear me out in saying that I scorned to call a witness in to put his name to it.

Business is not my strong point, and it never is with a man of largeness.

The next thing for me to see to was to get some wicked warrants quashed; which a deep ignorance of my character, and the lies of very low villains, had induced some weak or vicious magistrates to issue;

And yet I could not be sure that she did not know it all, and hide it all, for the joy of boasting afterwards.

I understand everything, except women.

When I was shown into the drawing-room, and Mrs. Stew with a curtsy went out, as if afraid to trust herself in a presence so imposing, I had a great mind to take a nip at some of the rubbish upon the table.

“

Because thou art the only rogue I never was a match for. There, go thy way now; go thy way; or I shall be asking thee to dinner.

”

I had not met a single soul to know me, or to speak my name, although the moon was a quarter old, and I found a broken spar, and bore it as I used to bear my fishing-pole.

No man who has not been long a-roving can understand all the fluttering ways of a man’s heart when he comes home again.

How he looks at every one of all the old houses he knows so well; at first as if he feared it for having another piece built on, or grander people inside of it.

All the children he used to know are gone to day’s work long ago; and the new ones would scarcely trust him so as to suck a foreign lollipop. He knows them by their mothers; but he cannot use their names to them.

There is nothing solid dwelling for a poor man long away, except the big trees that lay hold upon the ground in earnest, and the tombstones keeping up his right to the parish churchyard.

Along the wall of this I glanced, with joy to keep outside of it; while I struck, for the third time strongly, at not being let into mine own house.

Her eyes shone, for a moment, with bright gratitude towards him for reconciling her with her pride; and then being shy at my presence perhaps, she turned away, just as she used to do, and said to herself very softly—

“I would rather have a home though⁠—I would rather have a home, and a father and mother of my own, instead of beautiful charity.”

Master Berkrolles told me, when she was gone, that many children of the place had no better manners than to be always shouting after her, when coming back from the sandhills, “Where’s your father? Where’s your mother? Where’s your home, Delushy?”

After saying that if I reported myself at Narnton Court by the end of October he would have me cared for and sent on, he concluded with these stirring words:—

“There is a great war near at hand; our country will want every man, young or old, who can fight a gun.”

These last words fixed my resolve. I had not been very well treated, perhaps; at any rate, my abilities had not been recognised too highly, lest they should have to be paid for with a little handsomeness.

But Captain Bampfylde, who showed the strangest interest in these savages, would on no account have them flogged until they gave occasion. He said that their ideas of justice might be thrown into a crooked line, if the cat-and-nine-tails were promiscuously administered.

Whereas I knew that the only way to make a man dwell upon justice is to give him a taste of the opposite.

He values the right after this, because he thinks there is none of it left upon earth.

and nothing else can counteract all the heresies around us. Therefore this little boy’s cheeks were brighter than any rose, from towelling; and his beautiful eyes without speck of dirt; and the top of his head as sweet and curly as a feathering hyacinth.

When I perceive that I have had the luck to make an impression my rule is to say nothing at all, but appear to be unaware of it.

This rule is founded on common sense; and it took me so long to find it out, that it ought to be worth something. Otherwise, what offence one gives! And not only that, but consider how seldom the man who succeeds deserves it.

“Your Honour,” said Jack, having picked up some of my correct expressions, “it is not me; it is God Almighty. I was told afore ever I learned to read, or ever heard of reading, how it was. And so it is in the Bible now.

Poor men go to heaven, rich men go to hell. It must be so to be fair for both.

”

I felt that it was all of pure unreasonable kindness; the very thing which a man of spirit cannot bear to put up with. I have felt this often, when our Parson discoursed about our gracious Lord, and all the things He did for us.

A man of proper self-respect would like to have had a voice in it.

This, however (as Hezekiah told us in the cockpit, after we had pickled him), might be safely attributed to the force of unregeneracy; while a man who is down in luck, and constitution also, trusts to any stout mortal for a loan of orthodoxy.

Many men of noble nature dwell upon nothing but conscience; as if that were the one true compass for a man to steer by—whereas

I never did find a man⁠—outside my own Sunday clothes⁠—whose conscience would not back him up in whatever he had a mind for.

My own had always worked like a power plainly exposed to everyone; thereby gaining strength and revolving as fast as a mountain windmill, when the corn is falling away to chaff. This, however, was not required in the present instance;

“I believe in the King of England; I have faith in discipline; I abhor all Frenchmen worse than the very devil.” Such was his creed; and at any moment he would give his life for it.

It is something for a man to know what he means, and be able to put it clearly; and this alone fetches to his side more than half of the arguers who cannot make their minds up.

But it is a much rarer gift, and not often combined with the other, for a man to enter into, and be able to follow up, ways and turns, and ins and outs, of the natures of all other men.

They thought that we would not fight that night, for the sun was low when we found them; and with their perpetual conceit, they were hard at work taking water in. I shall never forget how beautiful these ships looked, and how peaceful.

A French ship always sits the water with an elegant quickness, like a Frenchwoman at the looking-glass.

And though we brought the evening breeze in very briskly with us, there was hardly swell enough in the bay to make them play their hawsers.

“I am heartily glad of it, Captain,” I cried; “the boy was worthy of any rank.

Worth goes a little way; birth a long way.

But all these things have to be lawfully proven.”

“Rodney, will you let me alone?

I am not a French decker of five hundred guns, for you to do just what you like with.

And I don’t believe anyone knows you are here. Yes, yes, yes! Ever so many darlings, if you like—and ‘with my whole heart I do love you,’ as darling Moxy says.

so that I really need not repent of my noble faith in the female race. This encouraged me; from its tendency to abolish prejudice, and to let the weaker vessels show that there is such a thing as a cork to them.

Men are apt to judge too much by experience on this subject; when they ought to know that experience never does apply to women, any more than reason does.

Nevertheless my Polly saw the way in and out of a lot of things, which to me were difficult. Especially as to the manner of handling her cousin, Mrs. Shapland, a very good woman in her way, but a ticklish one to deal with.

To pass this lightly—as now behoves me—just let me tell what Susan Shapland said, when I worked it out of her.

Any man can get the truth out of a woman, if he knows the way; I mean, of course, so far as she has been able to receive it.

To expect more than this is unreasonable; and to get that much is wonderful. However, Polly and I, between us, did get a good deal of it.