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paper an' preachin' them out of pulpits, does want to be cuttin' them
on the tombstones. Look here all around you in what airt ye will. All
them steans, holdin' up their heads as well as they can out of their
pride, is acant, simply tumblin' down with the weight o' the lies
wrote on them, 'Here lies the body' or 'Sacred to the memory' wrote on
all of them, an' yet in nigh half of them there bean't no bodies at
all, an' the memories of them bean't cared a pinch of snuff about,
much less sacred. Lies all of them, nothin' but lies of one kind or
another! My gog, but it'll be a quare scowderment at the Day of
Judgment when they come tumblin' up in their death-sarks, all jouped
together an' trying' to drag their tombsteans with them to prove how
good they was, some of them trimmlin' an' dithering, with their hands
that dozzened an' slippery from lyin' in the sea that they can't even
keep their gurp o' them."

I could see from the old fellow's self-satisfied air and the way in
which he looked round for the approval of his cronies that he was
"showing off," so I put in a word to keep him going.

"Oh, Mr. Swales, you can't be serious. Surely these tombstones are
not all wrong?"

"Yabblins! There may be a poorish few not wrong, savin' where they
make out the people too good, for there be folk that do think a
balm-bowl be like the sea, if only it be their own. The whole thing
be only lies. Now look you here. You come here a stranger, an' you
see this kirkgarth."

I nodded, for I thought it better to assent, though I did not quite
understand his dialect. I knew it had something to do with the
church.

He went on, "And you consate that all these steans be aboon folk that
be haped here, snod an' snog?" I assented again. "Then that be just
where the lie comes in. Why, there be scores of these laybeds that be
toom as old Dun's 'baccabox on Friday night."

He nudged one of his companions, and they all laughed. "And, my gog!
How could they be otherwise? Look at that one, the aftest abaft the
bier-bank, read it!"

I went over and read, "Edward Spencelagh, master mariner, murdered by
pirates off the coast of Andres, April, 1854, age 30." When I came
back Mr. Swales went on,

"Who brought him home, I wonder, to hap him here? Murdered off the
coast of Andres! An' you consated his body lay under! Why, I could
name ye a dozen whose bones lie in the Greenland seas above," he
pointed northwards, "or where the currants may have drifted them.
There be the steans around ye. Ye can, with your young eyes, read the
small print of the lies from here. This Braithwaite Lowery, I knew
his father, lost in the Lively off Greenland in '20, or Andrew
Woodhouse, drowned in the same seas in 1777, or John Paxton, drowned
off Cape Farewell a year later, or old John Rawlings, whose
grandfather sailed with me, drowned in the Gulf of Finland in '50. Do
ye think that all these men will have to make a rush to Whitby when
the trumpet sounds? I have me antherums aboot it! I tell ye that
when they got here they'd be jommlin' and jostlin' one another that

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