Mockery Gap Read Online Free PDF

golden earrings were buried.
    Ever since the people of Mockery had raised the mound over the bones of their king, whohad died about the time of the great flood, the king’s spirit had brooded there, and had watched the inhabitants of the village of Mockery.
    He liked Mr. Caddy, who hadn’t for some years now taken the trouble to work for a living, for Mrs. Caddy did the work while Mr. Caddy told the stories; all of which contained night-time or, as Mr. Caddy would have said, bedtime matters.
    And Mr. Caddy wouldn’t always confine himself to such simple subjects, for he would sometimes—and the heathen ghost liked to hear him—mention his betters.
    ‘They do say,’ Mr. Caddy had been heard to remark, ‘that wold God be everywhere—but ’E bain’t where I be, and that I do know. Parson do a-preach of, an’ even Mr. Pink ’ave a-named ’E; and some do tell that ’twere God who made the wide roaring sea, and the more fool ’E to make en, so I do say. But I do believe,’ and here Mr. Caddy would wink slyly, ‘that ’E did a-make each pretty maiden.’
    Even though the one who rested in the mound for ever liked Mr. Caddy, he had no love for Mr. James Tarr, and so he decided, did Farmer Cheney come to dig there, he would be greeted with some accident or trouble or ever he found the golden earrings.

Chapter 5
‘D ON’T S TRAY’
    A PPARENTLY Mr. James Tarr paid no heed to the young women that he met when about his grandmother’s business; for old Mrs. Tarr had always said that people should have an interest in life.
    Had he done so, he could hardly have failed to notice Mary Gulliver, who was gathering sticks in the hedge when he gave her father the map he had promised him some days before. Mary had noticed Mr. Tarr and had wished he had spoken to her, because men were the kind of creatures that Mary liked far better than cows or sheep if they came near to her.
    When Mary was very young, and her blushes were so many that they were become her true complexion, she had permitted Simon Cheney, the young man who was most sought after by the Mockery girls, to take her up to the green mound.
    Simon did so, as Mary wished, who felt as he kissed her that she really was a girl in petticoats.
    Soon after young Simon had first kissed Mary, her mother had, for no reason unless she was grown tired of making butter, walked one May morning into the sea. Some said that she did so because Mr. Tarr, in whose service she had been before she wasmarried, advised her more than once to be very careful to keep her husband at home because of his name. ‘Mrs. Gulliver feared to lose him, and so she went first,’ was how Miss Pink saw the matter.
    As soon as Mrs. Gulliver’s body was laid under the corner elm in the Mockery churchyard , to the great entertainment of the pack of Mockery children who had watched the proceedings , the Rev. John Pattimore returned with the bereaved family to their cottage, and, sitting in a straight-backed chair with a look that plainly showed he had come there to give a serious warning, he explained to Mr. Gulliver and to Mary all the subtle ways by which a young girl could be led into sin. Mary stared hard at him as if he were addressing her and her father in the Greek tongue, while Mr. Gulliver listened with an eager interest, as though in each corner of the room he was aware that a door to hell was being opened.
    â€˜Now that your wife is gone,’ said Mr. Pattimore, ‘you must guard your daughter with the greatest care; you must prevent her from wandering for too long a time near to the sea; and beware of all nakedness.’
    â€˜You don’t think, do you,’ asked Mr. Gulliver with a scared look, ‘that anything might come up to she naked out of they waters?’
    â€˜I hope not,’ replied Mr. Pattimore, ‘but it’s best to be careful.’
    â€˜And you must never allow her on Sundays to wander in the dark lanes after the evening service,