MEMORIES 'J^ 



there he would swing by the hour at a dizzy height 

 like some big spider. 



But "Steeple Jack" never mended the broken 

 iron cross beneath the vane. It had lost a bit of 

 floral work, which Peter Yeo, the gamekeeper, had 

 knocked off as a lad with a shot from his cross- ^ '— 



bow. 



Peter was our daily oracle : our deus ex machina 

 in every strait. If a pike ran off with a trimmer, 

 Peter fished it out; if the puppies were ill, Peter 

 put them right; and though I must own to a feel- 

 ing, come upon me since, that gunpowder and 

 tobacco were but a limited pharmacopoeia, still the 

 greatest discoveries are ever the simplest, and 

 nothing succeeds like success. He was privileged 

 to keep a cow, which he had won as a calf one 

 Boxing-day at the " Spar Shoot." For Peter, though FenJ^. 

 an old man, had an eye as keen as a hawk's. They 

 used to say that Peter young was a match for any 

 five men about. " Knock one down, t'other come 

 on," was how they used to put it. Be that as it 

 may, he was a huge man of immensely powerful 

 frame, and seemed to us boys a very Colossus of 

 Rhodes as he stood in his favourite attitude as 

 umpire at the village cricket-matches. 



