"stoker-dracula-168" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stoker Bram)

an' nowt else. These bans an' wafts an' boh-ghosts an' barguests an'
bogles an' all anent them is only fit to set bairns an' dizzy women
a-belderin'. They be nowt but air-blebs. They, an' all grims an' signs
an' warnin's, be all invented by parsons an' illsome beuk-bodies an'
railway touters to skeer an' scunner hafflin's, an' to get folks to do
somethin' that they don't other incline to. It makes me ireful to
think o' them. Why, it's them that, not content with printin' lies
on paper an' preachin' them out of pulpits, does want to be cuttin'
them on the tombsteans. Look here all around you in what airt ye will;
all them steans, holdin' up their heads as well as they can out of
their pride, is acant- simply tumblin' down with the weight o' the
lies wrote on them, 'Here lies the body' or 'Sacred to the memory'
wrote on all of them, an' yet in nigh half of them there bean't no
bodies at all; an' the memories of them bean't cared a pinch of
snuff about, much less sacred. Lies all of them, nothin' but lies of
one kind or another! My gog, but it'll be a quare scowderment at the
Day of Judgment when they come tumblin' up in their death-sarks, all
jouped together an' tryin' to drag their tombsteans with them to prove
how good they was; some of them trimmlin' and ditherin', with their
hands that dozzened an' slippy from lyin' in the sea that they can't
even keep their grup o' them."

I could see from the old fellow's self-satisfied air and the way
in which he looked round for the approval of his cronies that he was
"showing off," so I put in a word to keep him going:-

"Oh, Mr. Swales, you can't be serious. Surely these tombstones are
not all wrong?"

"Yabblins! There may be a poorish few not wrong, savin' where they
make out the people too good; for there be folk that do think a
balm-bowl be like the sea, if only it be their own. The whole thing be
only lies. Now look you here; you come here a stranger, an' you see
this kirk-garth." I nodded, for I thought it better to assent,
though I did not quite understand his dialect. I knew it had something
to do with the church. He went on: "And you consate that all these
steans be aboon folk that be happed here, snod an' snog?" I assented
again. "Then that be just where the lie comes in. Why, there be scores
of these lay-beds that be toom as old Dun's 'bacca-box on Friday
night." He nudged one of his companions, and they all laughed. "And my
gog! how could they be otherwise? Look at that one, the aftest abaft
the bier-bank; read it!" I went over and read:-

"Edward Spencelagh, master mariner, murdered by pirates off the
coast of Andres, April, 1854, aet. 30." When I came back Mr. Swales
went on:-

"Who brought him home, I wonder, to hap him here? Murdered off the
coast of Andres! an' you consated his body lay under! Why, I could
name ye a dozen whose bones lie in the Greenland seas above"- he