Hands off! she cried. Here
stands a post, which you set up yourself, or which we put up
together and agreed that this should be the boundary line for
ever. Inkpen sneaked off to hide herself in her village, and
Coombe, determined to keep the subject in mind, set up a
brand-new stout gibbet in the place of the old rotting one.
That too decayed and fell to pieces in time, and the present
gibbet is therefore the third, and nobody has ever been hanged
on it. Coombe is rather proud of it, but I am not sure that
Inkpen is.
That was one of three strange events in the life of the
village which I heard: the other two must be passed by; they
would take long to tell and require a good pen to do them
justice. To me the best thing in or of the village was the
vicar himself, my put-upon host, a man of so blithe a nature,
so human and companionable, that when I, a perfect stranger
without an introduction or any excuse for such intrusion came
down like a wolf on his luncheon-table, he received me as if I
had been an old friend or one of his own kindred, and freely
gave up his time to me for the rest of that day. To count his
years he was old: he had been vicar of Coombe for half a
century, but he was a young man still and had never had a
day's illness in his life--he did not know what a headache
was. He smoked with me, and to prove that he was not a total
abstainer he drank my health in a glass of port wine--very
good wine.
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