CHAPTER XIV.

ON CRONES AND CORPSE-LIGHTS.

THE bird life on the flats and along the shore did not engross the whole of Den's spare time. For weeks together he was hardly seen there, and old Nance, "worritted to death," as she often said, by those "owdacious young varmints," would actually get anxious about the boy, and hope no harm had come to him.

But the lads had other hunting - grounds to run over. There were the sluices to inspect, the wharves to visit, and the tidal mills, besides the big quay with its shipping. Old Nance said it was a wonder the boys were not drowned twenty times in a week. Nance's tongue ran away with her at times. They certainly had some narrow escapes. Occasionally they might be seen on the top of the sluice-gates

with one of the miller's sons, fishing for flounders with hook and line, Scoot and Winder looking like animated scarecrows in their cruising rags, as they called their dilapidated clothing. The miller's son was of what might be technically termed a higher class socially than their own; but one virtue the wellto-do inhabitants of the marshlands possessed-they seldom forbade or prevented their boys from mixing in their games with the poorer children, so long as these were free from vicious habits.

Den's kinsman was inclined to be a little fastidious in this respect, but then he had held the office of Portreeve more than once; and that was a post of dignity, he who held it being, as we have stated before, appointed by what was called a court leet, which was instituted as long ago, according to the annals of the antiquated village of Marshton, as the time of the Saxon King Alfred the Great. The constables were appointed by the same august body.

The rods, lines, and bait were always provided by Scoot or Winder. They had ways and means inaccessible to Denzil, and sometimes such as did not suggest themselves to to his more fastidious or scrupulous conscience.

A more common way of catching flounders, however, was by spearing them with one of their mother's iron forks lashed on to a long stick. A missing fork, or one minus a prong, caused, as they would say, many a stiffish breeze to spring up in the family interior. The flounder flourishes best where the fresh water and the salt meet, at the mouth of some tidal creek, when the tide is low. There he lies in about a foot of clear water, his body exposed, but his head and goggle eyes buried in the sand. He is very quick in his movements when startled, and shoots off like a flash.

The method in favour was as follows: the spearer walked gently up stream with his long stick and fork in hand, making many a rapid stroke, but not always a sure one. Sometimes the fork would come down with force on a stone, bending or breaking the prongs. When this was replaced very quietly in the family box and brought out again at dinner-time, Scoot said he had to clear out of harbour pretty quick if he didn't want to be scuttled at his berth.

Like the sea-gulls, the boys were here to-day and there to-morrow, and when they were quietest they

were sure to be up to some mischief or other. In "fork borrerin' and larrupin' doors o' nights," or badgering old Snoove the blacksmith at his smithy door, they found ample employment for their active young brains and hands. Sometimes they persuaded the fishermen to take them some distance down the creek and along shore, and then to put them on land at some desirable point, from which they made their way across marsh and flat to their own homes again. From the Reculvers and the Romney marshes, up to where the Thames and the Medway meet the tide, they knew that shore, and all its wild stories, and the ghostly traditions of the flats; the treacherous rotten swamp, where, it was said, the souls of those who had been drowned at sea came to get their corpse-lights, and to hunt for a spot of dry ground, where they indicated to the living they wished their bones to be laid when they happened to be washed on shore. If only the smallest bit of bone could be found, and Christian burial be given it, they believed the ghost would be laid.

It was small wonder if the fishing folk, holding the gloomy and stern religious views they did, believed in corpse-lights and other apparitions, for even

the more enlightened religious publications of the day told stories about corpse candles and tokens.

The lonely farms on the marshes had all of them some legend connected with their history-some spirit that haunted them either in the past or present: there was doubtless a grain of truth in all of them.

The high school for scandal in Marshton was when the old crones and gossips gathered together, as they did from time to time, nearly all of them widows, in the house of one of their number who was in better circumstances than the rest-her husband having been captain and owner of a small vessel there to drink her very best gunpowder tea. That was the occasion for "jest a leetle drop o' sumthin' beside the milk and sugar in the cups jist a taste to mek the tea agree with yer better."

These old ladies had wonderfully tenacious memories, and the vigorous action of their tongues seemed to compensate for the loss of physical power in their limbs. One of the young fishermen used to say very disrespectfully of his mother-in-law, who was one of the liveliest of these crones, that "the old gal had the roots of her clapper fresh iled every night, so as it should go right in the mornin'. When fruit-time