Right Little, Tight Little Island

Sark Is The Only feudal state to survive in Europe. It is a fief; as such, it was given to a feudal lord by Queen Elizabeth I in 1565, and it passed from hand to hand for almost 400 years until, nowadays, it occupies those of Mrs. Sibyl Hathaway, a very proper, elderly, sensible British lady who lives in a venerable manor house there, and who chooses to be known as the Dame of Sark. Mrs. Hathaway, the Dame, is not only lord and mistress of Sark and its 500 or so inhabitants but also, in the words of Queen Elizabeth, owns "all of its rights, members, liberties and appurtenances, and all and singular castles, fortresses, houses, buildings, structures ruined with their fragments, lands, meadows, pastures, commons, wastes, woods, waters, watercourses, ponds, fees, rents, reversions, services, advowsons, presentations, rights of patronage, of rectories, vicarages, chapels or churches, and also all manner of tithes, oblations, fruits, obventions, mines, quarries, ports, shores, rocks, wrecks of the sea, shipwrecks, farms, feefarms, knights' fees, wards, marriages, escheats, reliefs, heriots, goods and chattels waived, goods and chattels of felons, fugitives or pirates, or felones-de-se, outlaws, of persons put in exigent, and the forfeited or confiscated goods of persons condemned or convicted any other way whatsoever; also all forfeitures, pawnages, free warrens, courts leet, views of frank pledge, assize and assay of bread, wine and beer; all fairs, markets, customs, rights of tolls, jurisdictions, liberties, immunities, exemptions, franchises, privileges, commodities, profits, emoluments, and all the Queen's heredits whatsoever with every of their appurts, situate within the seas or seacoast contiguous or appertaining to the Island, or within its shores, limits or precincts, and whatsoever were held, known, or accepted as members or parts of the Island of Sark."

It is clear, I think, that Mrs. Hathaway is a power to be reckoned with in Sark. (By the way, the place, is one of the Channel Islands, off France; it can be seen from the Pan American Clipper to Paris.) There are other powers in Sark, but almost all of them are chosen by Mrs. Hathaway and are collectively known, by many of the people there, as (continued on page 42)Tight Little Island (continued from page 39) "Mrs. Hathaway's gang" – the seneschal, who can be thought of as a president; the prevot, who can be thought of as a sheriff; the treasurer; and the greffier, who can be thought of only as a greffier – and there is a legislature, the Chief Pleas, but Mrs. Hathaway has a veto power. She herself is supported, in high style, by an intolerable lot of feudal taxes taken from the500 citizens of Sark, who can be thought of as vassals and serfs: a tithe on wheat, a tithe on cider, on lambs and on wool, a royalty on minerals, a "rente" on property, a "tresieme" on property sales and a tax on chimneys, to be paid annually in live chickens. She has been called a dictator in the Chief Pleas.

Mrs. Hathaway's attitude toward this unparalleled deal of feudal power is a rather curious one, and can best be described by saying that she thinks it terribly quaint. She is, as I have said, a very proper, typical, suburban British lady, of the sort that sponsors musical evenings and literary teas in the United States, and when she is asked by students of medieval history or by other proper, typical, suburban British ladies, to tell them of some of the feudal laws under which she administers Sark, she invariably replies, firstly, that the Dame of Sark is the only one on the island permitted to keep a female dog and, secondly, that the Dame of Sark is the only one permitted to keep a pigeon. No one will deny, of course, that these particular laws are awfully quaint, even accruing to the well-being of the community, but, which is also true, a country can't hope to be adequately governed nowadays by these two principles alone. They are, if anything, the beginning and not the end of a body of laws; yet, whoever inquires further of Mrs. Hathaway as to the Sarkese legal process, or who looks into them himself, will find that everything else is chaos. The laws of Sark are three and four hundred years old; they are written by hand, and often illegibly, in English, French and Anglo-French, the language of Medieval Normandy; and the seneschal, who is not only Sark's president but its only judge, is kept in such a fine seat trying to understand them that he is known to blanch and get visibly agitated when a real lawyer is brought into his court. The seneschal, it would appear, cites most of the law off the top of his head, trying to bluff it out, a judicial procedure that leads to such interesting courtroom exchanges as this, a tax case:

The Seneschal: Do you know on what your tax is based?

Mr. Sutcliffe: No.

The seneschal: On one thousand two hundred pounds. Can you prove to the court that you haven't one thousand two hundred pounds?

Mr. Sutcliffe: The onus is on you, sir. Is it money in the bank, plant, or equipment?

The Seneschal: On capital.

Mr. Sutcliffe: Will you define capital?

The Seneschal: Only capital.

Mr. Sutcliffe: What capital do you refer to? This is quite absurd.

The Seneschal: I presume I can do as I please. I have every authority to sue you for contempt.

The prospect of a man trying to prove how much money he doesn't have, and of a judge suing the defendant for contempt of court, does not, apparently, strike Mrs. Hathaway as an undesirable one, and, on her lecture tours in the United States where she is introduced at women's clubs as "Mrs. Sibyl Hathaway, the Dame of Sark," she is ever delighted to say that the laws of Sark haven't changed since 1565, but that "we wouldn't have it otherwise, for we believe that they serve our purpose and meet our needs." Meanwhile, at home, the laws of Sark have reached so hopeless a state that it's debatable if Mrs. Hathaway is the Dame of Sark; a great many Sarkese are sure that Mr. Michael Beaumont, of 5 Whitepost Hill, Redhill, Surrey, England, is really supposed to be their feudal lord.

Thus encumbered with a crazy body of law that only makes sense when applied to the disposition of dogs and pigeons, the island of Sark staggers through the 20th Century like a man in medieval armor and, like him, it causes a rather terrifying din and electrical display when it runs into the revolving doors and high-tension wires of this modern age. Sark's collision with the electrical power lines of the 20th Century is more than a metaphor; it really happened, in 1949, and it shows the rather slapdash mechanism of the Sarkese legal process. Sark was without electricity until 1949, when Mr. Henry Head, a wry, stocky, enterprising member of the Chief Pleas, proposed in that deliberative body to have the island electrified. Mrs. Hathaway said yes, the seneschal said no, and the greffier was so deaf that he didn't hear the vote, which consequently isn't known to this day; at this, Mrs. Hathaway ordered the electricity company to put the poles up, the seneschal ordered it to take them down ("They make a heck of a noise when it blows," said the seneschal), and the greffier promised to get a hearing aid before the next legislative session. By now, as can well be imagined, the electric company was fit to be tied, and all was pandemonium when the Chief Pleas sat again. Mrs.Hathaway spoke first and was fast interrupted by a loud whistle.

"I don't think that's funny at all!" said Mrs. Hathaway, bristling, but the greffier hurriedly explained that he hadn't gotten the hang of his hearing aid. This experience with the manifestations of electricity was enough, apparently, to convince Mrs. Hathaway that the stuff couldn't be trusted for soon she was speaking against it. The seneschal helped matters not at all by recommending a vote of censure against Mr. Henry Head, who, it will be remembered, had started all the trouble, and the meeting ended amid unanimous catcalls directed, for the most part, at Mr. Head. The electric company realized, by now, that it's every man for himself in Sark; it put up the poles, electrified such theretofore inviolable places as Mrs. Hathaway's house and the Chief Pleas' deliberative halls, and has been making a healthy, illegitimate profit ever since. Meanwhile, Mr. Head, having been censured, went angrily the next day into the greffier's office and began acquainting himself there with Sarkese law, an unprecedented and absolutely perilous thing to do on Sark and, when the Chief Pleas sat again, he triumphantly told that astonished body that it was illegitimate, and that all its laws for the past quarter century were null and void. For almost a year after that, the Chief Pleas was thoroughly in a stew trying to legitimize itself – amending its constitution, carrying on elections, and writing desperate letters to King George VI, in his capacity as Queen Elizabeth I's successor, all the time keeping Mr. Head at bay by charging him the equivalent of one dollar and five cents hourly to do any further research into the Sarkese law books. (Nowadays, the members of the Chief Pleas have to pay 35 cents hourly to read the law.) When everything had been set aright, the Chief Pleas turned its attention furiously to Mr. Head, elected him Constable of Sark and Colorado beetle inspector, and told him that under the provisions of feudal law a constable (and by extension, presumably, a Colorado beetle inspector) is required to serve for two years and, without pay, as police chief, jail warden, district attorney, tax collector, harbor master, truant officer, impounder of unauthorized bitches, and superintendent of public works, roads and sanitation. At that, Mr. Head turned purple again and swore that his first act as constable would be to jail every member of the Chief Pleas; but the unchartable ways of Sark are shown by the fact that the only such to be jailed, subsequently, was Mr. Henry Head himself, the constable. All of this had blown over by the time (continued on page 73) Tight little island(continued from page 42) I visited Sark. The gorse on the hillsides was quietly in flower, two or three cows walking unambitiously among it, and a soft Atlantic wind sent yellow tremors through the wheat fields. Mr. Head was clipping his hedges, idly; he was no longer Constable of Sark, he told me, but, on pleasant days, he liked to stroll along the beach to look for Colorado beetles on the incoming tide. It was a relatively peaceful Sark while I was there, and Mr. Head expressed the hope it would last. A few months later, therefore, I was rather dismayed to come across an issue of the Guernsey Star and learn that Mr. Head had set off still another wave of hysteria in the Chief Pleas by making what would be, in almost any other legislature, a not especially inflammatory proposal – namely, that taxpayers in Sark ought to be given receipts. The Guernsey Star records the following exchange:

Mr. Head: I have received no receipt from the constable for the pound I sent him last November.

The constable (his color rising): I have Mr. Head's receipt at home. What does he think —; I've kept the money?

Mr. Head (likewise): I am asking again for my receipt.

The constable: I'll send you your receipt.

Mr. Head: I am not the only person who has not had a receipt. Will receipts be sent to everybody?

The constable: They will all have receipts!

Mr. A. G. Falle: I can't understand why Mr. Head is asking all these questions; we will be here all day.

By now, however, a number of other questions had occurred to Mr. Head, relative to land reform, contracts, seagulls, and a feudal officer identified as the Procurator of the Poor; he also pointed out that a law to require the registration of .22 and .303 rifles had been passed five years earlier, and straightaway thought no more of it ("The fact remains," said Mr. Head, "that we gladly pass new laws and then forget all about them"): and he complained that his Personal Tax Bill had been called 12 pages of trash by the seneschal, whereupon:

The seneschal: Well, it was 12 pages of trash.

Mr. Head: And I thought it was such a brilliant piece of work!

Presently, it would appear, everybody in the Chief Pleas was shouting at once, some of them in English and some in Norman patois, the very peculiar dialect of Sark; "Let them learn our language!" shouted Mr. A. G. Falle, in Norman patois; "Can you teach it? You can't even write it!" shouted Mr. Harold de Carteret, in English; "I have a wolf in the stomach and a sponge in the gullet!" yelled Mr. Head, metaphorically; and the meeting was boisterously adjourned. It was no doubt resumed the following day, but I've been unable to get hold of that day's Guernsey Star.

• • •

One of the feudal laws in Sark that is vigorously enforced by Mrs. Hathaway is that no automobiles may go there; Mrs. Hathaway is very proud of it, and regularly tells her audiences in America that this is one of Sark's most delightful virtues. The extremities of Sark are three miles apart, so the people use tractors to get about. These are ever to be seen on the Sarkese landscape – great, ungainly, rusty spiders that thunder along the roads by day, kicking up the dust with man-sized, rubber wheels; at night, they are really a caution. When I came to Sark, a tractor was in readiness at the pier; my baggage and that of the other people was put in back, and we ourselves sat uncomfortably among it while a bony, uncommunicative fellow got into the saddle, did a number of things there, caused the tractor to emit a splendid quantity of blue-black gases, did a number of other indescribable things, and took a course uphill; five minutes of this and he was altogether spent, brought the tractor to a stop, discontinued the blue-black gases, and hurried into a tavern. We, the excursionists, were none too steady ourselves, and followed him in.

The tavern was an oaken and quietly gemutlich one, and it was frequented, at this hour, by what I learned was a cross section of the Sarkese community – farm hands, hired men, and some propertied folk whose ancestors had lived in Sark since 1565, some old-timers with tired, yellowing, porous mustaches and the faces of Norman fishermen, some Englishmen and women who made their homes there. The old-timers were in a brown study, for the most part, and hadn't much to say, but the others enthusiastically had given themselves over to gossip, and within an hour had told me of easily a dozen indecorums on the part of Mrs. Hathaway, from 1901 to the present, and on the part of her father, her mother (the former of whom was given to kicking the latter downstairs in the Gay Nineties, I was assured), and her late husband, a graduate of Yale named Mr. Robert Hathaway, who, it was alleged, was selling tennis balls in London when he stumbled fortunately upon the Dame of Sark. This sort of gossip is always to be heard in Sark; it is not only told by the highly unreliable sources I met in the tavern but is reciprocated by such impeachable authorities as the Hathaway family itself; there is so much of it, and so much that is said in malice that, I'm afraid, it would be difficult to find a less delightful place than the island of Sark to live. The general ill-feeling is bound to rub onto the tourists, who never seem to be especially happy and who develop a wary, conspiratorial look after too long a vacation there.

It took a bit of doing to get past all of this gossip and learn something about Sark itself but, after making inquiries of the most persistent sort, I am pleased

to report to my readers some of the native customs that have been peculiar to Sark as long as anyone can remember – namely, that wine and cake are given to everyone on wedding days, that apples and oranges are given to the children on New Year's Day, that rabbits are shot on Christmas Day, that clay pipes are shot on Christmas Day and New Year's Day, that model boats are built at home by children and floated on Good Friday along the Petit Beauregard Pond, that all boats are built at home and gotten to the ocean and that the lady who launches them is put on the deck with a champagne bottle and is simultaneously launched herself. The Sark Guide which can be got there for a shilling, informs me that, at certain times, "almost the whole population of Sark, armed with hooks and baskets, may be found in the most inaccessible places on the shore, frantically turning over boulders, often being rewarded with as many as two hundred ormers," a native custom that, I trust, will be clarified in future editions, and the Reverend Mr. J. L. V. Cachemaille, writing in 1828, reports that a common entertainment was to dress a man as a donkey: "Many an evening was passed in this way, particularly in winter," says the Reverend Mr. Cachemaille, "and the result was that much time was wasted, bad habits were contracted, and were followed by immorality." A man as a donkey is very frightening to Sarkese children, but even the grownups are given a nasty turn when they run into Tchico, the dog of the dead, a ghost. Naturally, one expects to find a reasonable number of such disembodied spirits at a tourist resort but Sark has more than its share, I think, being haunted in season by a headless rider, a riderless coach, an amphibious manner of spook at the bottom of wells, and some as yet unidentified apparitions in the village jail, as well as others; indeed, the atmosphere in Sark is so thick with ectoplasm that the people must needs take practical measures against it, notably by fixing a few stones to their chimneys to keep the witches out. Mrs. Hathaway herself, speaking of the manor house she lives in, has written that "the Seigneurie has no less than four of these stones, and so effective are they that not a single witch has come down the chimneys within living memory." I take it that Mrs. Hathaway is being merry with us here, but it ought to be noted that she resorted to the black magic of Albertus Magnus when one of her daughters, Mrs. Douce Alianore Daphne Beaumont Brisco, had warts, and that she let some white knitting-wool be tied around one of her cows after it had been bewitched. "I have no comment to make upon this," Mrs. Hathaway has written since, "except the important one that I still have the cow."

Not only is Sark so possessed by witches and spooks as to be almost uninhabitable by human beings but, I learned, its most prominent and reigning family, that of Mrs. Hathaway, is cursed – not a very pleasant curse, even as curses go, but one that ought to be told of, nevertheless. It began in the early eighteen hundreds, I learned, when silver was discovered in a desolate part of Sark. I have seen the place: there is a sinkhole nearby, and you can go 50 yards down into it, and then to the ocean along a cave; the ground is soft with cinnamon-brown seaweed, and the only sounds are the slapping waves. A certain Mr. Peter Le Pelley was feudal lord when the silver was found here; the assay specified muriate of silver, sulphuret of silver, sulphuret of silver and antimony, black sulphuret of silver, ruby silver, antimonial silver, and argentiferous and auriferous iron pyrites, and Le Pelley's eyes must have bulged as he read all this. He put $170,000 in the silver mine, but the vein ran dry.

What happened next is that Mr. Le Pelley hurried to Guernsey to pay his creditors, notably Mrs. T. G. Collings; the boat sank, Mr. Le Pelley drowned, Mrs. T. G. Collings foreclosed, and there was such consternation in Sark that Mr. Le Pelley's valet tried to jump off a cliff, being restrained by none other than the Reverend Mr. J. L. V. Cachemaille. Mrs. T. G. Collings became the Dame of Sark, and was straightaway cursed for having done so by the ghost of Mr. Le Pelley – or by some other ghost, this part of the story being not especially clear – and she died that very year, without ever seeing Sark. Mrs. Collings' son and the next feudal lord, the Reverend Mr. W. T. Collings, was not conspicuously cursed, but he very nearly died the same way as Mr. Le Pelley, and his son, Mr. William F. Collings, was the man who reportedly kicked his wife downstairs. (Besides, he was arrested on the island of Guernsey for shooting a naval officer, on Jersey for raising cain at a brothel, and on Sark for knocking the constable's hat off.) One of his children was cursed with a cleft palate, and the other – the present Mrs. Hathaway – with a shorter leg, while, in the present century, the seven children of Mrs. Hathaway have been so awfully cursed that she's on speaking terms with only one of them, Mrs. Jehanne Rosemary Ernestine Beaumont Bell. Three of the others are dead: Mr. Basil Ian Beaumont died in school, Miss Bridget Amice Beaumont died of cancer, and Mr. Francis William Lionel Collings "Buster" Beaumont died in bed with a British actress; Mr. Richard Vyvyan Dudley Beaumont, alias "Tuppeny," has been doing a stretch on Malta, and Mr. Cyril John Astley Beaumont is lying low in Australia; Mrs. Douce Alianore Daphne Beaumont Brisco, the girl with warts, was left at the altar, recently, by a Mr. Winterflood or Winterbottom, who was later found in a pub, said it was all a joke, and died of sleeping pills shortly after. The whole story isn't a very pretty one, and it's carried considerably further by the gossips.

I have mentioned that one of the accursed lords of Sark was very nearly drowned at sea, and this, too, is something that ought to be told of, not because it's an especially good story but because we hear entirely too much of the bravery of sea captains these days and, I think, it's worthwhile to see the other side of the coin. The story is told by the feudal lord in question, the Reverend Mr. W. T. Collings, who writes that his ship ran against a beacon on a rainy afternoon in 1872, at which: "The captain threw up his arms, and uttered one awful despairing cry, 'All's lost! All's lost!' As long as we live this cry will haunt us." The captain is next seen, in the Reverend Mr. Collings' narrative, as using the variation, "We are lost." Mr. Collings pointed out that the ship was well aground and the tide was falling ("No, sir, she is filling fast, we are lost"), and his son pointed out that after all, there was a lifeboat; the captain jumped into it first, followed by women and children and, lastly, by the Reverend Mr. Collings. Mr. Collings tried to be cheery, but the captain said, "We're drifting, we are going up the Russell, we are lost." Two hours later, the boat reached shore.

...

Sark's predicament as the only feudal state in Europe is so awfully hugger-mugger that I hesitate to pursue it further, but it hasn't been pointed out yet that Mrs. Sibyl Hathaway, in her capacity as a feudal lord, continues to owe allegiance to a feudal over lord, the Duchess of Normandy. Sark was part and parcel of Normandy in medieval days, and its overlord for more than a thousand years has been the duke or duchess – at present, a young, handsome, blue-eyed Englishwoman, who once a year is given a check for the equivalent of seven dollars as a token of Mrs. Hathaway's allegiance. Since 1066, of course, the Duchess of Normandy has also been the Queen of England, and, because of this, the English generally think of Sark not as a country in its own right but as an insignificant part of their queen's domain. The Sarkese, on the other hand, generally think of England as an insignificant part of their duchess' domain; after all, they point out, who conquered whom?

Duchess Elizabeth II of Normandy, and her ducal predecessors, have paid precious little heed to their vassalage of Sark, and, historically, have given Mrs. Hathaway and her predecessors a free hand there. (None of the dukes and duchesses so much as visited Sark. Duchess Victoria circumnavigated the place in 1859 and was given a 21 gun salute in gratitude – "which no doubt she distinctly heard," says the Reverend Mr. Cachemaille. It's lucky she didn't land, I think; some peacocks had gotten into the manor house earlier in the day, tearing the place apart and one knows how the duchess would have felt. Elizabeth II spent an afternoon in Sark in 1949, before her ascendency as duchess, and thereby gave a wealth of material to the gossips that's yet to be exhausted, one of the juicier items being that her husband, Prince Philip, got to Sark with so bloody a hangover that his first words to Mrs. Hathaway were, "Have you an aspirin, please?") Elizabeth II can countermand the doings of Mrs. Hathaway and the Chief Pleas, but never has. It goes without saying that English law doesn't apply in Sark; English postage stamps are used, but the pass ports are those of the States of Guernsey, and the money is that of England and Guernsey; and Englishmen who visit Sark must go through customs, paying 21 cents as a landing fee. After 600 days there, they are exempt from the draft and English taxes. Sark has the power to try and punish its criminals by its own, un-English laws, but nowadays it lets Guernsey handle the big ones, like murderers.

I haven't made a study of the judicial processes of Guernsey, though I'm told they're a peculiar thing, really – the jury is chosen for life – but I've watched a criminal trial in Sark, and I think it was very peculiar. The trial was that of Mr. Edmund Falle, who was accused of closing his tavern one morning at 12:40, instead of the legal hour, 12:30. The complaint, such as it was, had been lodged a week or two earlier by Mr. Phillip Perree, the constable, who was out to make trouble for Mr. Falle because Mr. Falle's son, Mr. Stanley Falle, Mr. Perree's assistant, was due to become constable the next month and was out to make trouble for him. The prosecuting attorney was Mr. Perree, the plaintiff; and the trial judge was the nephew of the defendant, as well as the first cousin of Mr. Stanley Falle, the assistant constable – Mr. Willie Baker, the seneschal, who would also function as a jury. All of this was explained to me by Mr. Henry Head, who sat alongside me in court, and I'm pretty sure I've got it straight. Mr. Head explained, further, that he himself was in court as a correspondent for the Guernsey Star, the Guernsey Evening Press, and the Jersey Evening Post; he said it was Sark's first trial in several weeks, and he intended to whoop it up a bit, being paid on space rates. As we waited for the proceedings to begin, I read a few of his dippings and discovered, from them, that so little of any importance happens in Sark that Mr. Head must usually write about Mr.Head, notably by resingning in high dudgeon from the Chief Pleas, the constabulary,or the Colorado beetle inspectorship, and hurrying to himself for an interview. "Mr. Henry Head, Sark's go-ahead constable, may startle the island this week by giving his resignation,"wrote Mr.Henry Head, theGuernsey Star's go-ahead correspondent, in 1951. "This is the second time he has made this threat within two months. In an exclusive interview yesterday..." The doings of Mr.Head were warmly applauded by Mr. Head in many of the clippings("The existent law is too terrible to think about. Mr.Henry Head's proposal deserves support") and, on one memorable occasion, when the outlook for news was especially desperate, he was accorded a 3000 word eulogy by himself in the columns of the Guernsey Evening Press,some of the more cordial passages being,"Mr.Head,who several years ago earned from me (i.e., Mr.Head) the pseudonym of the 'stormy petrel of Sark, has over the past two years more than qualified for the title... The fact remains that none will dispute the fact that Mr. Henry Head has made history with a capital 'H' during the past two years of his reign as constable and in doing so has gained for Sark more publicity than it ever before received. Mr. Head has made few friends but many enemies in Sark, but no one will begrudge him his due in the fact that he has done his honorary job with rare conscientiousness, even if, at times, in the opinion of some, without tact."

The courtroom where I was reading all this, and where the trial of Mr. Falle would momentarily begin, was a small, unpretentious room in the elementary boy's school. Its desks were sandy in color, with cases of blue-black ink;chalk was everywhere, and the blackboard at the front was full of arithmetic, like "How many 11/2d stamps can be bought for £2-11s-71/2d?" Presently, there was a call for silence, and the room was entered by Mr.Willie Baker, the seneschal, a trim, careful, bespectacled man who was wearing a brown suit with leather hems, and by Mr. Hilary Carre, the gref-ficr, who looked as I had imagined a greffier would– rather like a gopher, with a jolly face, two buck teeth and a pot belly. The two men seated themselves by the blackboard, and the seneschal opened the trial by observing that the matter in dispute was whether Mr. Edmund Falle did, or didn't, serve any drinks between the hours of 12:30 and 12:40 A.M.; that Mr. Falle said he didn't; and that the constable said he did– a point the constable clarified at once by springing to his feet, saying, "I couldn't of said for whom customer it was; it was, though." The constable was accustomed to Norman patois, not English. His lips were tight and bitter.

The constable was now called upon by the seneschal to produce his witnesses, and answered, in what was very close to astonishment, "I'ven't got any witnesses." This disclosure was followed by a great deal of silence, which lasted till Mr. Falle's lawyer harrumphed a bit, observing, "It is customary, I believe, for the prosecution to have witnesses when they call a case." The seneschal said something to the effect that customs differ in different lands, and suggested that, although the prosecution hadn't any witnesses, perhaps the defense had, and Mr. Edmund Falle took the stand in his own behalf.

"It was 12:30 o'clock, and I called out,time!" said Mr. Falle, "and nobody got any drinks after. I tried to get them, everybody, out, and if the constable hadn't of been there, I would of gotten 'em out. The constable was--"

"What did you do to get them out?" said Mr. Falle's lawyer.

"I called out,time! I turned the lights out. The constable was takin' names, like I said, and everybody was waitin' and seein' what'd happen." By now, it was clear to everyone but the seneschal that the constable had nothing but a grudge against Mr. Falle. "I asked the constable t' help," said Mr. Falle, "but he's busy takin' names, he said."

"Yes," said the constable, interrupting, "but there'd been no nothing there, and Mr. Falle called out, time, and showed no head t' pushin''em out, and they're still servin' drinks at th' other end."

"When?" said the seneschal, who was fast going into a quandary.

"It was 12:40, you c'n test m' watch," said the constable.

"It was 12:30," said Mr. Falle.

"You, Mr. Falle, are you absolutely sure of that?" said the seneschal.

"I'm absolutely sure of that," said Mr. Falle.

"Absolutely?"

"Absolutely."

"Well," said the seneschal, brightly, "one of the watches must have been wrong!"

"There was money circulatin' after th' bell had rang, half pas'12," said the constable.

"There's something wrong somewhere," said the seneschal.

The seneschal adjourned the court to deliberate, the constable shooed everyone outside, Mr. Henry Head hurried to a telephone, and the greffier slapped a beret onto his head and rode furiously off on a bicycle. I ran into the seneschal a few days later. "It's quite a problem," he told me, "quite a problem." I sailed away from Sark before he had solved it.

"But, Karen, of course you a purpose in life!"