I Broke My Fast On Bread And Wine At A Place Where The Road Crosses
The River, And Then I
Determined I would have hot coffee as well, and
seeing in front of me a village called Rupt, which means
'the cleft'
(for there is here a great cleft in the hillside), I went up to it and
had my coffee. Then I discovered a singular thing, that the people of
the place are tired of making up names and give nothing its peculiar
baptism. This I thought really very wonderful indeed, for I have
noticed wherever I have been that in proportion as men are remote and
have little to distract them, in that proportion they produce a great
crop of peculiar local names for every stream, reach, tuft, hummock,
glen, copse, and gully for miles around; and often when I have lost my
way and asked it of a peasant in some lonely part I have grown
impatient as he wandered on about 'leaving on your left the stone we
call the Nuggin, and bearing round what some call Holy Dyke till you
come to what they call Mary's Ferry'... and so forth. Long-shoremen
and the riparian inhabitants of dreadful and lonely rivers near the
sea have just such a habit, and I have in my mind's eye now a short
stretch of tidal water in which there are but five shoals, yet they
all have names, and are called 'The House, the Knowle, Goodman's Plot,
Mall, and the Patch.'
But here in Rupt, to my extreme astonishment, there was no such
universal and human instinct.
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