For a moment, the memory of about a hundred
Christmas stories was too much for me--so weird of aspect and earthy of
atmosphere was the vestry at Spotswold. And then "being gone" the
shadows of the Christmas stories, I was a man and a lawyer's clerk
again, and set myself assiduously to search the registers and
interrogate my ancient.
I found that individual a creature of mental fogginess compared with
whom my oldest inhabitant of Ullerton would have been a Pitt, Earl of
Chatham. But I questioned and cross-questioned him until I had in a
manner turned his poor old wits the seamy side without, and had
discovered, first, that he had never known any one called Haygarth in
the whole course of those seventy-five years' vegetation which
politeness compelled me to speak of as his "life;" secondly, that he
had never known any one who knew a Haygarth; thirdly, that he was
intimately acquainted with every creature in the village, and that he
knew that no one of the inhabitants could give me the smallest shred of
such information as I required.
Having extorted so much as this from my ancient with unutterable
expenditure of time and trouble, I next set to work upon the registers.
If the ink manufactured in the present century is of no more durable
nature than that abominable fluid employed in the penmanship of a
hundred years ago, I profoundly pity the generations that are to come
after us.
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