of the most obstinate Wesleyan
rest beside his forefathers.

"Wesleyan!" shouted the Parson. "Who cares if he was a Jew? I won't have
my churchyard defiled by that blackguard's corpse. Only a week before he
died, I saw him with my own eyes fling two or three pieces of white-hot
metal to some ducks that were looking for worms in the ditch outside his
smithy, and the wretched birds gobbled them down and died in agony. I
cursed him where he stood, and the judgment of God has struck him low,
and never shall he rest in holy ground if I can keep him out of it."

The elders of the village expressed their astonishment at Mr. Trehawke's
unreasonableness. William Day had been a God-fearing and upright man all
his life with no scandal upon his reputation unless it were the rumour
that he had got with child a half lunatic servant in his house, and that
was never proved. Was a man to be refused Christian burial because he
had once played a joke on some ducks? And what would Parson Trehawke
have said to Jesus Christ about the joke he played on the Gadarene
swine?

There is nothing that irritates a Kelt so much as the least
consideration for any animal, and there was not a man in the whole of
the Rhos peninsula who did not sympathize with the corpse of William
Day. In the end the dispute was settled by a neighbouring parson's
coming over and reading the burial service over the blacksmith's grave.
Mark apprehended that his grandfather resented bitterly the compromise
as his fellow parson called it, the surrender as he himself called it.
This was the second time that Mark had witnessed the defeat of a
superior being whom he had been taught to regard as invincible, and it
slightly clouded that perfect serenity of being grown up to which, like
most children, he looked forward as the end of life's difficulties. He
argued the justification of his grandfather's action with Cass Dale, and
he found himself confronted by the workings of a mind naturally
nonconformist with its rebellion against authority, its contempt of
tradition, its blend of self-respect and self-importance. When Mark
found himself in danger of being beaten in argument, he took to his
fists, at which method of settling a dispute Cass Dale proved equally
his match; and the end of it was that Mark found himself upside down in
a furze bush with nothing to console him but an unalterable conviction
that he was right and, although tears of pain and mortification were
streaming