And laughed and chatted, but without
taking any notice of me; those who sat and chatted took, or
appeared to take, as little notice as those who lay and slept of
his reverence Father Toban.
CHAPTER XLII
Gage of Suffolk - Fellow in a Turban - Town of Holyhead - Father
Boots - An Expedition - Holy Head and Finisterrae - Gryffith ab
Cynan - The Fairies' Well.
LEAVING the pier I turned up a street to the south, and was not
long before I arrived at a kind of market-place, where were carts
and stalls, and on the ground, on cloths, apples and plums, and
abundance of greengages, - the latter, when good, decidedly the
finest fruit in the world, a fruit, for the introduction of which
into England, the English have to thank one Gage of an ancient
Suffolk family, at present extinct, after whose name the fruit
derives the latter part of its appellation. Strolling about the
market-place I came in contact with a fellow dressed in a turban
and dirty blue linen robes and trowsers. He bore a bundle of
papers in his hand, one of which he offered to me. I asked him who
he was.
"Arap," he replied.
He had a dark, cunning, roguish countenance, with small eyes, and
had all the appearance of a Jew. I spoke to him in what Arabic I
could command on a sudden, and he jabbered to me in a corrupt
dialect, giving me a confused account of a captivity which he had
undergone amidst savage Mahometans. At last I asked him what
religion he was of.
"The Christian," he replied.
"Have you ever been of the Jewish?" said I.
He returned no answer save by a grin.
I took the paper, gave him a penny, and then walked away. The
paper contained an account in English of how the bearer, the son of
Christian parents, had been carried into captivity by two Mahometan
merchants, a father and son, from whom he had escaped with the
greatest difficulty.
"Pretty fools," said I, "must any people have been who ever stole
you; but oh what fools if they wished to keep you after they had
got you!"
The paper was stuffed with religious and anti-slavery cant, and
merely wanted a little of the teetotal nonsense to be a perfect
specimen of humbug.
I strolled forward, encountering more carts and more heaps of
greengages; presently I turned to the right by a street, which led
some way up the hill. The houses were tolerably large and all
white. The town, with its white houses placed by the seaside, on
the skirt of a mountain, beneath a blue sky and a broiling sun, put
me something in mind of a Moorish piratical town, in which I had
once been.
