More Tales of the Ridings | Page 8

Christmas season, had left their barracks shortly before
midnight, and, proceeding to the officers' quarters, had greeted them
with a hymn. And the Christmas moon, rising high above the
mountains of Gilead and Moab, had found for a short space of time an
opening in the curtain of mist and had poured down its light upon the
hills of Judea, making the city of Bethlehem seem to the rapt minds of
the two Yorkshire dalesmen as though it had been the city of the living
God let down from heaven.

Tales of a grandmother
I. The Tree of Knowledge
I spent a certain portion of every year in a village of Upper Wharfedale,
where I made many friends among the farm folk. Among these I give
pride of place to Martha Hessletine.
Martha Hessletine was always known in the village as Grannie. She
was everybody's Grannie. Crippled with rheumatism, she had kept to
her bed for years, and there she held levees, with all the dignity of
bearing that one might expect from a French princess in the days of the
_grand monarque_. The village children would pay her a visit on their

way home from afternoon school, and of an evening her kitchen hearth,
near to which her bed was always placed by day, was the Parliament
House for all the neighbouring farms. What Grannie did not know of
the life of the village and the dale was certainly not worth knowing.
Grannie's one luxury was a good fire. A fire, she used to say, gave you
three things in one--warmth, and light, and company. Usually she burnt
coal, but when the peats, which had been cut and dried on the moors in
June, were brought down to the farms on sledges, her neighbours
would often send her as a present a barrow-load of them. These would
last her for a long time, and the pungent, aromatic smell of the burning
turf would greet one long before her kitchen door was reached.
I was sitting by her fireside one evening, and it was of the peat that she
was speaking.
"We allus used to burn peats on our farm," she said, "and varra warm
they were of a winter neet. We'd no kitchen range i' yon days, but a gert
oppen fireplace, wheer thou could look up the chimley and see the stars
shining of a frosty neet."
"But doesn't a peat fire give off a terrible lot of ash?" I asked.
"Aye, it does that," she replied, "but we used to like the ash; we could
roast taties in't, and many's the time we've sat i' the ingle-nook and
made our supper o' taties and buttermilk."
So her thoughts wandered back to bygone times, while I, not wishing to
interrupt her, had taken the poker in my hand and with it was tracing
geometrical figures in the peat-ash on the hearthstone. So absorbed was
I in my circles and pentagons that I did not notice that Grannie had
stopped short in her story, and was taking a lively interest in what I was
doing. It was with no little surprise, therefore, that I suddenly heard her
exclaim, in a voice of half-suppressed terror: "What is thou doing that
for?" and turning round, I was startled to see on her usually placid face
the look of a hunted animal.
Touched with regret for what I had done, and yet unable to understand

why it had moved her so deeply, I asked what was troubling her mind.
For a few moments she was silent, and then, in a more tranquil voice,
replied: "I can't bear to see anybody laiking wi' ashes."
"Why, what does it matter?" I asked, and, in the hope that I might help
her to regain her composure I began to make fun of her superstitious
fancies. But Grannie refused to be laughed out of her beliefs.
"It's not superstition at all," were her words; "it's bitter truth, and I've
proved it misen, to my cost."
Seeing how disturbed she was in her mind I tried to change the subject,
but she would not let me. For about half-a-minute she was silent, lost in
thought, her grey eyes taking on a steeliness which I had not seen in
them before. Then she turned to me and asked: "Has thou iver heerd tell
o' ash-riddling?"
"Of course I have," I replied. "Everybody knows what it is to riddle
ashes."
"Aye, but ash-riddling on the hearthstone, the neet afore St Mark's
Day?"
Here was something unfamiliar, and I readily confessed my ignorance.
It was evident, too, that Grannie's mind could only find relief by
disburdening itself of the weight which lay upon it, so I no longer
attempted to direct her thoughts into a new channel.
"It was 1870," she