The Silkworms of Florence

"How old do you say it is?" asked Mr. Pringle.

"Let me see," reflected the beadle, stroking his long grey beard. "He
killed Mr. Grebble in 1742, I think it was--the date's on the tombstone
over yonder in the church--and he hung in these irons a matter of sixty or
seventy year. I don't rightly know the spot where the gibbet stood, but
it was in a field they used to call in my young days 'Gibbet Marsh.'
You'll find it round by the Tillingham, back of the windmill."

"And is this the gibbet? How dreadful!" chorused the two daughters of a
clergyman, very summery, very gushing, and very inquisitive, who with
their father completed the party.

"Lor, no, miss! Why, that's the Rye pillory. It's stood up here nigh a
hundred year! And now I'll show you the town charters." And the beadle,
with some senile hesitation of gait, led the way into a small attic.

Mr. Pringle's mythical literary agency being able to take care of itself,
his chambers in Furnival's Inn had not seen him for a
month past. To a man of his cultured and fastidious bent the Bank Holiday
resort was especially odious; he affected regions unknown to the tripper,
and his presence at Rye had been determined by Jeakes' quaint
"Perambulation of the Cinque Ports," which he had lately picked up in
Booksellers' Row. Wandering with his camera from one decayed city to
another, he had left Rye only to hasten back when disgusted with the
modernity of the other ports, and for the last fortnight his tall slim
figure had haunted the town, his fair complexion swarthy and his
port-wine mark almost lost in the tanning begotten of the marsh winds and
the sun.

"The town's had a rare lot of charters and privileges granted to it,"
boasted the beadle, turning to a chest on which for all its cobwebs and
mildew the lines of elaborate carving showed distinctly. Opening it, he
began to dredge up parchments from the huddled mass inside, giving very
free translations of the old Norman-French or Latin the while.

"Musty, dirty old things!" was the comment of the two ladies.

Pringle turned to a smaller chest standing neglected in a dark corner,
whose lid, when he tried it, he found also unlocked, and which was nearly
as full of papers as the larger one.

"Are these town records also?" inquired Pringle, as the beadle gathered
up his robes preparatory to moving on.

"Not they," was the contemptuous reply. "That there chest was found in
the attic of an old house that's just been pulled down to build the noo
bank, and it's offered to the Corporation; but I don't think they'll
spend money on rubbish like that!"

"Here's something with a big seal!" exclaimed the clergyman, pouncing on
a discoloured parchment with the avid interest of an antiquary. The folds
were glued with damp, and endeavouring to smooth them out the parchment
slipped through his fingers; it dropped plumb by the weight of its heavy
seal, and as he sprang to save it his glasses fell off and buried
themselves among the papers. While he hunted for them Pringle picked up
the document, and began to read.

"Not much account, I should say," commented the beadle, with a
supercilious snort. "Ah! you should have seen our Jubilee Address, with
the town seal to it, all in blue and red and gold--cost every penny of
fifty pound! That's the noo bank what you're looking at from this window.
How the town is improving, to be sure!" He indicated a nightmare in red
brick and stucco which had displaced a Jacobean mansion.

And while the beadle prosed Pringle read:

"CINQUE PORTS TO WIT:

"TO ALL and every the Barons Bailiffs Jurats and Commonalty of the Cinque
Port of Rye and to Anthony Shipperbolt to Mayor thereof