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.
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