Posts on His Deeds Are Dust

Selecting 8051 tools

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 14:48:00 +0000

In 1997, I first dumped the ROM from a DEC VT320 video terminal and decided to try to decode it. The processor in these terminals is a member of Intel’s MCS-51 family of microcontrollers, in this case a Siemens SAB8031A, with a 64 KiB ROM.

I wrote a disassembler and simulator (both long since lost) and started trying to decode the ROM, having never used an 8051 before. I got the disassembler to only decode the parts that I needed, following the call path so as not to get confused by what I assumed would be large chunks of data in there. I still have a printout from February 1998 of the state of annotated disassembly at the time, tiny lettering on 112 lines-per-page printout, running to 67 pages. I had to give up soon after coaxing the simulated terminal through the power-on self-test, thinking that there were probably subtleties of the 8051 instruction execution that I had got wrong, because I didn’t know how to stimulate it into doing anything interesting.

Close-up of a VT320 circuit board.

Nearly 20 years later, I’ve come across that printout and decided that, in the wake of my annotated disassembly of the VT100 video terminal, I’d give my favourite terminal another go.

The VT100 uses an 8080, and for that project I quite easily found a disassembler and 8080 simulator core written in C that I could reuse to get the terminal’s code running. Finding 8051 tools has proven slightly more frustrating.

I started with the disassembler, which was simple enough. Jeffery L. Post’s D52 disassembler (now maintained by Eric Smith) has a control file which lets you mark sections as being code or data, so you don’t spend time looking at incorrectly interpreted chunks. It has an analyse function to produce an initial control file. In practice, this tends to follow control flow and opts out of disassembling sections that it can’t see a clear call to. However, its inability to decode jump tables means that it significantly under-disassembles if you use this option. I don’t regret using it, although it took many days of effort wading through the disassembly, marking ‘binary’ sections in the control file back as ‘code.’

The other difficulty with interpreting the disassembly and finding code sections has nothing to do with D52. The terminal software uses a lot of jump tables, and DEC decided to place all the 16-bit addresses in these in little-endian format, despite the 8051 being a big-endian processor. Obviously marking these tables as data words with the ‘dw’ format wasn’t going to work, so I decided that the next tool I was going to need, an assembler, would have to be a macro assembler.

I asked on a mailing list for recommendations for FOSS macro assemblers and simulators for the 8051. The following assemblers were mentioned:

Ken Stauffer’s AS31
W. W. Heinz’s ASEM-51
Alfred Arnold’s Macroassembler AS (got a lot of votes)
San Bergmans’ SB-Assembler 3

AS31 doesn’t have a macro facility, which rules it out for large projects like this one, but I tried it anyway. As it was written in 1990, the dialect of C is so old that gcc threw many warnings and I feared that it wouldn’t produce an executable. It uses non-standard directives for data (’.byte’ instead of ‘db’) and I couldn’t get the assembly to finish even after pre-processing these, because the parser has an ambiguity between binary and hexadecimal constants. In theory it will accept hexadecimal constants suffixed by ‘h’, with the usual caveat that hex numbers starting with ‘a’ to ‘f’ should be prefixed by ‘0’. However, AS31 accepts binary literals prefixed by ‘0b’, so AS31 choked on my hexadecimal literal ‘0bch.’ It seems to be very strict on single quotes versus double quotes too. At that point I was tired of pre-processing my source code and tried the next tool.

I would normally have ruled out ASEM-51 as it has no source available. It is free however, and cross-platform, so I downloaded the Linux binary and pointed it at my source. There was just one issue, in that I’d labelled the start of the code as ‘reset,’ when that is a built-in symbol. After deleting that, it assembled all 40 KiB of source to an Intel HEX file. Running that through hex2bin.py gave me an image identical to the original ROM.

Ten minutes later, I had read the manual sufficiently far to create the macro I needed to get the jump tables in the correct format:

dwl macro address
    db low(address),high(address)
endm

And I stopped there: ASEM-51 works for me. I will try Macroassembler AS at some point, but for now I’m cleaning and annotating the source, safe in the knowledge that I can rebuild the binary after every change, as protection against fat-fingering anything.

Trace, trace, baby

Simulators are rather more thin on the ground. These names came up:

Seemanta Dutta’s gSim51
Jari Komppa’s emu8051
James Rogers’ EdSim51

gSim51 was an almost immediate bust. When you’ve navigated the ad-laden hell of Sourceforge (why is it even still a thing?) and downloaded the code, it won’t build. There are functions missing. The source has crossed-out code in comments as ideas were changed on the fly. This is some college assignment that has been dumped on the web. Avoid.

emu8051 is simple and rather cute. It doesn’t have full debugging facilities such as breakpoints, but it presents an ncurses-based text interface that shows the current line, registers, flags and one of the areas of memory that you can change at will. You can set the PC and then single-step or run the code. I tried setting the PC and stepping through some of the routines that I’d identified where aspects puzzled me, and it helped out.

However, it wasn’t long before it crashed out with a segfault, with me jumping around the code. I then ran it over another routine that I was having trouble decoding, and the results were not at all what I expected. This routine used some BCD arithmetic and the numbers in registers didn’t match what I’d calculated by hand. I took a look at the source and realised that the ‘DA A’ instruction was implemented incorrectly, and it was being fed incorrect flags because the ‘ADD’ instruction was also wrong. Uh oh. A look at the open issues with pull requests on Github suggests that this isn’t being actively used, and I don’t want to spend my time chasing down segfaults, so I’ll look elsewhere.

Where else? At this point, I’m seriously considering writing a small 8051 core myself, because I have the schematics for the VT320 and I know exactly how the ports, DUART, EEPROM, video interface, timers and interrupts are wired up.

I downloaded EdSim51 but I haven’t found a way to run it on Fedora 43 without it complaining that I don’t have the X11 DISPLAY environment variable set. Setting it does no good, possibly because of the shift to Wayland. At this point it’s a toss-up as to whether I hate Java or Wayland more.

My unsophisticated Perl cribsheet

Thu, 26 Dec 2024 18:33:34 +0000

For donkey’s years I have been developing web applications with Apache httpd, Perl, CGI and MySQL, because that has always been the default setup on my web host. I know I should be moving away from nearly all of these, with the exception of Perl, but that would involve me doing something funky with a new server environment, containers, droplets or, sigh, anything that gets kicked into next year’s resolutions.¹

Unfortunately, since 1999 I have been tripped up every few years with a new release of one of the above layers that actually improves their Unicode support (yay!), while triggering problems somewhere else (boo.) I still remember how scared I was when I found out that some strings are internally Latin-1 and some are Unicode and thinking that I needed to mess with internal flags to manipulate them. So very glad to have been proven wrong, there.²

Long story short, for my own benefit (and before I trigger another layer collapse), this is how I am currently tackling Unicode from bottom to top of my web environment, because I want poo emojis in my database as much as anyone else. This reflects my understanding of the setup that is currently working for me.

Perl 🔗

Since my scripts are written in Perl, this is the major part. I need all these parts to support Unicode:

Command line arguments. I like testing web scripts from the command line, particularly because I like to see a JSON output for the big hashes that I normally pump through Template Toolkit in order to produce a web page.
Database connection.
Web response, which really means getting the correct encoding on stdout.
JSON output. At the moment, I use this for testing but I do hope to get more sophisticated over time and have more AJAX-y pages or a working API for my applications.

The first lines of my Perl scripts are:

#!/usr/bin/perl -CAS
use v5.34;
use utf8;

Taken in order:

perl -CAS says that the default file handles (input, output, error) are UTF-8 encoded. Command line arguments are also UTF-8 encoded. Essentially, all my strings in Perl will contain Unicode characters, not octets, and serialising to/from UTF-8 happens at my interfaces. With these options, I no longer have to put binmode STDOUT, ':utf' in my scripts.
use v5.34; just keeps me up-to-date with the latest features I can use on my webhost, which allows me to say say. I no longer have to say use strict, but I’d still need use warnings until I get to v5.36.
use utf8; allows me to put Unicode characters directly in my Perl script, and that is all it does. I like to do this directly, only resorting to \N{...} when I can’t clearly see what the character is meant to be, which in my monospaced Vim environment, means long dashes. I’ve never actually used a poo emoji in a script, though I’ve undoubtedly written many a program which could be judged that way.

CGI 🔗

Although I still use CGI.pm, it now only gets used for retrieving parameters and setting the content type of the response. I can either do:

use CGI ();
use Encode;
my $cgi = CGI->new;
my $p = decode('UTF-8', $cgi->param('q'));

to decode parameters myself, or

use CGI qw(-utf8);
my $cgi = CGI->new;
my $p = $cgi->param('q');

Clearly the latter is simpler. Either method does the appropriate deserialisation for me so that, again, I’m handling Unicode characters internally, not octets. As a bonus, for debug, I can just output things to stderr or stdout (where it doesn’t interfere with the web response), and the UTF-8 serialisation will happen for me.

MySQL 🔗

My web host (Pair Networks) uses MySQL 8.0, so my database text columns are created with a charset of utf8mb4 and a collation of utf8mb4_general_ci. Oddly enough, until two minutes ago, when I checked, I believed they were still using version 5.7. Clearly I’m not sophisticated enough to have tripped over problems during their transition.

My connection line looks like this:

my $dbh = DBI->connect($source, $user, $pass,
          { mysql_enable_utf8mb4 => 1 });

and that performs all the (de)serialisation I need. That MySQL option used to be mysql_enable_utf8, before characters got larger.

JSON output 🔗

JSON output is as simple as:

use JSON ();
my $json = JSON->new;
my $json_text = $json->encode($r);

The thing that tripped me up most recently was using JSON’s encode_json routine, without noticing that that does the UTF-8 serialisation, which resulted in me double-encoding the output. I find that I have to read documentation very carefully in order to distinguish between interfaces (functions) that consume or produce UTF-8 output versus Unicode output. I want Unicode internally, so that counting or splitting works as expected.

That’s a wrap 🔗

Now I’ve written it down and tested it, it looks simple again, but I was worried that I’d done something tragically wrong when I picked the wrong JSON routine and convinced myself that that was the correct part, rather than the rest of the components that had been working correctly up to that point. Sometimes I’m unsure enough of my understanding that I presume I’m more likely to have got two wrongs making a right than the clean stack.

Moving to Dancer2 is my top resolution for 2025, but I really need someone else to write that blog post that says “Get an account with so-and-so, run this super deployment script and copy your application here and Bob’s your uncle, and it’ll cost you 37p per month.” ↩︎
With the maturing of the ‘unicode_strings’ feature, this too became an historic worry. ↩︎

The Ghost of Morcar's Tower

Mon, 02 Dec 2024 21:58:03 +0000

Another great story I came across while indexing Blackwood’s Magazine. This was published anonymously in July 1879, but a later compilation of short stories published by Blackwood’s revealed the author to be M. C. Stirling.

The Ghost of Morcar’s Tower 🔗

For three generations the direct heir to the estate of Morcar’s Tower has not succeeded to the property. The last owner, Squire Fairfax, was a hale, jovial fellow, and had three stalwart sons, yet none of them lived to possess the place.

The eldest was killed when Clyde’s army relieved Lucknow; the second fell a victim to the jungle-fever that haunts the moist rice-fields of Central India; and the youngest,—it gives me a choking sensation in my throat even now when I recall his fate.

The hero of the Playing Fields, stroke of the eight-oar in the most closely contested race that Oxford ever won, he was a favourite everywhere, and the pride of his home. I can see him yet, with his laughing brown eyes, standing up against the crack left-handed bowler, who came assured of an easy victory for Stepton over the eleven of Stepton-in-the-Fens. There were some of us who thought when he carried his bat that greater triumphs must be in store for that ready hand, that watchful eye, and cheery spirit.

A year later, when a pleasure-boat went down in a squall, the only hope left us was that he had not suffered long, for there was a dark bruise on the pale forehead when the body was washed ashore. His father never recovered the blow, but died soon after his boy; and thus it came to pass that I, a distant cousin, found myself the owner of Morcar’s Tower.

The curse, if curse there still be, will be again fulfilled, for no children of mine will ever brighten the gloomy chambers of my new home. It matters not how I know this so certainly, for it is not my own story that I am about to tell. Suffice it to say that the joy was crushed out of my life ere I was thirty, so that I abandoned my chosen career, and hid myself in a lonely cottage, thinking that in the quiet life of a student I might find solace for my grief. When first I heard that the old Tower was mine, I was unwilling to remove from the abode to which I had already grown accustomed; but on further reflection I decided that the effort must be made, and that I must not shrink from my new duties on account of the melancholy associations connected with the place. To the Tower therefore I went, taking with me the treasured volumes that were my only friends.

For obvious reasons I cannot give the true names of the localities I am about to describe, but they will be easily recognised by any one belonging to the neighbourbood who may chance to peruse this tale.

Morcar’s Tower was situated in one of the flattest districts in England. In old days, before cannon were in use, it must have been a valuable stronghold, for it was then surrounded by a reedy fen, full of dangerous and unsuspected depths, and only practised guides could find the narrow paths that threaded through the grass and rushes, Gradually, however, the fen-land was reclaimed, though the drainage was extremely difficult; and a canal, more sluggish than any I have seen elsewhere, was cut across from the Ayder to the Deene. The soil was rich, and paid well; and at last a little town grew up, known as Stepton-in-the-Fens, to distinguish it from Stepton proper, or, as it was sometimes called, Stepton-on-the-Wold. This wold was nothing but a rise of the land on the west of the Tower, and would hardly have been remarked in a less level country.

The Tower itself was more properly a keep, square and grim, built of dark red stone that took a purplish hue when wet. Round it was a deep moat that on three sides had been hastily and carelessly filled up. Yellow hawkweed and the straggling ragged-robin grew in profusion on the unequal surface of the earth that had been thrown loosely into it; and I wondered greatly that my cousin should have allowed this disorderly fringe of weed to remain round the house, I remembered, however, that when my cousin Frank had once proposed some alteration, his father had replied, with unusual sharpness, that he did not choose to meddle with the moat. On the fourth side the ditch was its original depth, and a wooden bridge, with a high fantastic railing, crossed it where the drawbridge had formerly been. The walls of the Tower were enormously thick, and the interior was consequently somewhat sombre. There was plenty of heavy old-fashioned furniture, but there were few modern elegancies in the house. In the room that had been Harry’s were two new easy-chairs, some engravings after Landseer, and some pewters and cups,—relics of the foot-races and sculling-matches of his Eaton and Oxford days.

On the ground-floor were the drawing and dining rooms, with two smaller apartments; the bedrooms were up-stairs; and the servants—I had but three—lived in some newer offices quite at the back.

I myself chose to inhabit a curious turret that projected from one corner of the Tower, partly because it was light and cheerful, partly because I had used it when visiting my cousins in our boyhood. The round shoulder of the wold cut us off early from the evening sun, and from the turret windows I could watch the light being stolen from our Fens by the advancing shadows of the fir-clad rising ground.

I loved to see the last glitter die off the canal, and from between the reed beds, to watch a lazy barge perhaps being moored for the night, a grey heron oaring his way across the opal sky, or a string of carts or team of horses going slowly homewards,—for no living creature moved quickly in the Fens.

When all was still, save that the frogs had begun to croak among the rushes, I turned to my books, and in mystic volumes, such as the history of the Rosy Cross, sought for counsel from men who, like me, had resolved to be alone.

One night, when I had been about a fortnight at the Tower, I sat up rather later than usual at my studies. A new vista was opening before me, and I seemed to be on the point of reaching over that indefinable barrier that separates us from the world in which spirit is the known reality—a world whose laws must some day yield themselves up to our mastery. I raised my head, and drew in a long breath of the night air that blew in at the open casement. While sitting thus, pursuing an argument in my own mind, the sound of a stealthy footstep on the stair caught my ear, and abruptly broke the chain of my thoughts.

Irritated at this disturbance, I resolved to forbid the servants coming up-stairs so late, and then tried to resume my reading. But the words on the page conveyed no meaning to my mind, and I found myself dwelling instead on that unwonted sound.

Suddenly it flashed upon me,—I had not heard the step go away.

My door faced the stairs, and only a very small landing intervened. I looked at my watch; it was half-past one.

Obviously none of the household had any business up-stairs at that hour,—had I heard the step of a burglar who was even now outside my door? I was unarmed, and beyond reach of help, for the bell in my room communicated with an empty part of the Tower, and I had not yet given orders for its alteration. Hastily and nervously I locked my door, and listened long for a retiring footstep, but not a sound came, and I fell asleep at last without undressing. Next day I felt somewhat ashamed of the nervousness that had seized me; for though I do not boast of any special amount of animal courage, I had never before experienced such uneasiness. I concluded that my nervous system must be unstrung, and resolved to take more exercise than I had done of late.

I asked the butler casually, if he had been up-stairs late last night. He was an elderly man, and had spent many years in my cousin’s service, and 1 thought there was something strange in his look and tone as he replied, “No, sir; none of us were up-stairs.”

A confused remembrance of a ghost story came into my mind, told long ago by a chance guest, and summarily cut short by the old squire. Perhaps the Tower was haunted, and a ghost was part of my inheritance! I hesitated to inquire, lest I should put the idea into the heads of the servants; but as I had little faith in the supernatural origin of so-called ghostly disturbances, I took sundry precautions against imposture. I had once been a fair shot, so I opened a long-untouched box, and got out a pistol that had lain there for two years. This I cleaned and put away in my room. I then ordered that candles should be placed there in addition to my usual lamp, and desired that the bell should be at once altered.

When evening came, I sat down to my work, and read with quite my usual attention; but I could not recall the keen perception of the previous night.

About one o’clock I felt my mind wandering involuntarily from my book, although I had not been aware of the lateness of the hour until I looked at my watch: a quarter of an hour later I heard a faint sound. I listened anxiously: it was the same step as before, coming slowly up-stairs; the step of one who walks wearily—the step of a woman, for I distinctly heard the rustle of a dress. I quietly placed the lamp so that the light would stream right into the passage, cocked my pistol, and as the footsteps reached the door I threw it open. There was no one there.

A sense of horror seized me, and I think at that moment I would rather have met any visible foe than have stood face to face, as it were, with an empty sound.

Next morning Bond lingered unnecessarily in removing the breakfast things, and after glancing two or three times at me as I sat idly by the window, he spoke.

“Mr. Fairfax,—excuse me, sir—but you don’t look well this morning.”

“I don’t feel very well, Bond,” I replied.

“Been disturbed at night, perhaps, sir,” said the old man, pointedly.

“What do you mean? Why should I be disturbed at night?”

“Because you’re the owner of Morcar’s Tower, sir.”

“Then there is a story that I don’t know!” I exclaimed. “Go and finish your work, Bond, so as not to let the women remark anything, and then come and tell me about it.”

When he returned, Bond gave me a garbled version of the tale I shall presently relate in the words of one immediately concerned; but he added, that since the commission of the crime that gave Morcar’s Tower its evil name, it had been haunted by mysterious footsteps. No ghost had ever been seen, but these steps continually passed to the door of the room occupied by the owner, and there died away. My cousin, stout-hearted, practical man as he was, had tried every room in the Tower without escaping from this terrible guardian; and Bond thought the nervousness caused by the nightly visitation had helped to bring about Mrs. Fairfax’s sudden death.

Had he been a richer man, the squire would have abandoned the Tower; but he could ill afford to do so, and in time became accustomed to the ghost.

“Did none of my cousins ever hear it?” I inquired.

“Yes, sir, they did. Mr. James and Mr. Frank each heard it before they left home for the last time. Mr. Frank told me himself, sir, and said he thought it might be a sign he was never coming back.”

“And Harry——?”

“Master Harry was so much younger I don’t think he rightly knew the story. Mr. Fairfax made the other young gentlemen and me promise never to tell it to any one; and Master Harry wasn’t one to think of things of the sort.”

“How did the others find it out?”

“Same way as I did, sir, by master changing his room so often. They got it out of Mrs. Fairfax, poor lady, at last.”

“Well, Bond, I suppose I can depend on you to help me if I try to find out anything about the ghost.”

“Yes, sir; but I’d advise you to leave it alone, if I might be so bold.”

“My good fellow, I can’t go on living here without trying to understand this affair. If there is a ghost, there must be some reason for his or her coming; and if I could discover the reason, it might put a stop to these visits.”

“Well, sir, there’s no denying that would be a good thing; but I doubt you’ll find it beyond you to manage.”

“At least I’ll try, Bond,” said I, as he left the room.

That night I placed lamps on the stairs and in the passage that led to them, and made Bond sit up there that he might notice where the steps came from. I myself sat opposite the open door of my room, with my eyes fixed on the staircase. At a quarter past one, Bond called out, as agreed on, “It’s coming, sir;” and a minute later I distinguished the first footfalls. Slowly and steadily they came up-stairs, so that I could count the number of steps; they crossed the landing, and the last one planted itself on the threshold of my room; then there was perfect silence.

I shuddered and called Bond, who came up white and trembling.

“Sir, the steps walked by me where I sat; I watched the lamp as you told me, but I saw nothing pass between me and it. I don’t know where they began; they seemed to start at the end of the passage. Oh, sir, don’t meddle with them, or you’ll come to harm!”

“I hope not, Bond,” I replied. “I am satisfied that there is no trick, and I must think what is to be done next. Go to bed now, for I suppose we shall hear no more to-night.”

“No more, sir, the Lord be praised! It only comes once in a night; if it were oftener, I don’t think anybody could stand it.”

The old man evidently did not like the notion of a closer acquaintance with the ghost, but now that I knew exactly what happened, my own nerves were steady. I felt that here was an opportunity of testing some of the theories in which I was most deeply interested, and I resolved that no effort of mine should be wanting to prove them true or false. I believed in the power, possessed by a few strong wills, of influencing others at a distance; and my own studies had accustomed me to concentrate my thoughts, the first step towards exercising such a power, if, as I hoped, it was latent in me. I had never heard of any attempt to control a spirit by such means; but the idea did not appear to me impracticable. Where so little is known, experiments are of use, even though their results be only negative. If there is a spirit,—thus I argued with myself,—that wishes to communicate with the owner of this Tower, surely a reciprocal wish on his part, might render the process easier.

Again, the simplest facts of mesmerism show that one will can control another; surely a spirit, freed from human grossness, should be sensitively alive to every influence exerted over it. It only remains to be proved whether I have the needful strength, and whether I can keep cool and steady if I succeed so far as to obtain obedience from the spirit.

Having settled my plan of action, I began by taking a long and brisk walk in the early morning. Before dinner I confined my reading to historical works, but in the evening I perused carefully a volume in which I had found much curious and useful information on mesmerism. Soon after midnight I seated myself opposite my open door, having previously placed the lamps so as completely to light up the space before me.

Two rather ludicrous difficulties then struck me. In the first place, I did not know the sex of my unseen visitor. Bond’s story would have led me to suppose that a man would haunt the Tower, but there was nothing masculine in the gentle footfall, or the sound of the trailing robe.

Secondly, I knew that I must keep one idea steadily before me, yet I could hardly go on repeating the same formula, and I could not think without words. This difficulty, however, was a very elementary one, and would be easily overcome by practice. I fixed my eyes on the doorway, where the eyes of a figure of average height would be, and soon succeeded in making myself think an almost uninterrupted “Come!”

Unfortunately, the night was boisterous and stormy, the wind screamed past the casement, and swept on, as if in a hideous fugue, across the gloomy fens; but as my senses grew more and more keen, I did not doubt but that I could distinguish the familiar footsteps, even through all this storm-music.

After a while, the blood moved faster in my veins, my eyes were unnaturally fixed and hot, and my breathing was constrained and rapid, as though every muscle was stiffened,—a sensation quite unlike the deep full inspirations of severe physical exertion.

I should not have realised how great was the tension of my will had not a gust of wind made a gate in the garden bang suddenly, when the quiver with which my nerves responded to the sound betrayed to what a pitch I was excited.

It was close on the hour for the ghost’s visit. I passed my hand across my forehead and eyes, and at the same instant, distinct through the wailing of the wind, I heard the distant footfall. I grasped the arms of my chair, and half rose in the intensity of my wish; but when the steps reached the top of the stairs, something seemed to give way in my brain, the room and lights swam before my eyes; but as I sprang up, with my hands to my temples, I saw, or fancied I saw, against the bright background, a shadowy outline of a figure.

It was an instantaneous impression, and I sank back as helpless and weak as a child,—all power of will entirely gone.

An hour passed before I could shake off my lassitude sufficiently to go to bed; but I slept soundly, and to my great satisfaction found that, instead of being fatigued, I was more active than usual on the following day.

To Bond’s inquiries, I merely replied that I was carrying out a plan which I hoped would succeed in time, but that I could not give him the details.

It is unnecessary to describe the experiments of each succeeding night. I soon found that the power of concentrating my will increased with every effort. On three occasions I saw the same shadowy outline; but on each a chance sound disturbed me, or irresistible fatigue deprived me of strength just when I most needed it. At length I resolved to take one night’s uninterrupted rest, and to begin my next attempt only a few minutes before one, so as to have more power in reserve when the critical moment should arrive. I was glad to find that I attained almost immediately the required state of concentrated volition; but I endeavoured to make my condition more natural than it had ever yet been. I gazed more quietly and observantly at the spot where I hoped the spirit might appear, and made mesmeric passes as if before a figure facing me.

As one o’clock struck, my senses grew more alert; never before had I felt myself possessed of such subdued and controlled strength; even my breathing became deep and regular.

I could not account to myself for these novel sensations, but I was filled with a buoyant delight which was almost ecstasy. My hands, as I continued my passes, seemed to feel an opposing force, as though I were drawing a weight towards me. There was none of the former heat and excitement, but a genial warmth pervaded every limb.

I knew I had power over the spirit if I could but keep myself steady.

At last it was close on the quarter, when I heard the first step in the passage. I stretched out my hands in motionless command and expectation. As the steps reached the turn of the stairs the outline became visible once more; it grew distinct, came nearer, and pausing at the doorway, seemed to tremble and gathered itself into the form of a woman in a clinging robe, who bent towards me with a look that I shall never forget.

She was very young, and the misery on her face might have made the hardest heart pitiful. In her eyes there was that abiding look of horror that sometimes remains after a great mental shock—a look almost impossible to describe, but which conveys its meaning instantaneously. Her mobile lips were slightly parted, and her small hands. tightly clenched at her sides, Although every feature was distinguishable, there was no semblance of humanity about her; she was a pale shadowy figure, and the outline of her head and dress remained tremulous, as though ready to melt again into air.

As she gazed earnestly at me, I felt that she could communicate her thoughts to a certain extent, and read mine, in this mysterious spirit-contact. I did not speak, but I thought the words, “Poor soul, I will aid you in anything you wish!” A faint smile quivered over her face, and she bowed her head and beckoned me with one hand. Taking up a small lamp, I followed, while she passed down-stairs. Her movement was exquisite in its floating grace, and I remarked that her steps were no longer audible: the sound of them was not needed now to plead for her.

She led me along the passage to a deep window overlooking the moat. Here she paused, and pointed to a panel in the oak wainscoting. I could see nothing peculiar, and glanced towards the spirit for further explanation, Again and again she pointed imperiously to the same spot. I tried to speak, but my voice refused to come, so I thought the question I wished to ask.

“Am I to search here for something?”

Her smile answered me, and she then signed to me to open the window and come out. Placing my lamp on the floor so as to be out of the draught, I got over the low sill and stood at the edge of the moat. The spirit floated a yard or two further, and pointing down to the ground, wrung her hands piteously.

“Did some one die there?” I asked in a whisper, for I felt that my power was waning, and it was no longer difficult to speak. The pale hands pointed to the breast of the figure, which was already fading, as though her desire was accomplished.

“Tell me,” I cried, flinging myself down before her, “if I search the panel and this spot, will you be at rest?”

She bent towards me once more with a smile of intense peace on her face, and melted out of my sight.

Whether I fainted, or whether I fell into the deep sudden sleep that sometimes follows mesmeric exertion, I cannot tell, but when I came to myself day was breaking, and my lamp was burnt out below the open window.

After breakfast I gave Bond an account of my adventure, and could easily see that the good old man thought my brain was affected.

“You will help me to search the panel, Bond, and that will prove whether my story is true or only a dream,” said I.

To the window we accordingly went, and Bond inquired whether he was to break the wainscot.

“Certainly not,” I replied; “if there is a hiding-place here, there is some way of opening it, which I shall try to find before I allow the wood to be broken.”

Inch by inch I examined the wood, and compared the mouldings carefully with those on the opposite side. My attendant’s incredulity was so manifest, that I should greatly have preferred to prosecute the search alone, but by doing so I should have lost the testimony of an additional eye-witness to the discovery I felt confident of making. After a long and patient scrutiny I found in the lower corner of the panel an inch or so of moulding that fitted into the rest. Another quarter of an hour passed, ere, by a chance movement, I gave it the turn required to loosen it. When it came out, and showed a spring concealed below it, my excitement was very great, and Bond himself began to share the feeling, and hurried off for oil with which to clean the rusty metal. We soon discovered the secret of the bolt, and a portion of the panel slid back below the moulding, revealing a small recess in which lay a roll of manuscript tied with a black ribbon. Dust and damp had made the writing difficult to decipher; but when the sad history lay spread before me, I decided to give it to the world, along with an account of my mesmeric experiment. I have modernised the spelling, and supplied a few obvious words that were either blotted or illegible in the original. The date was eaten away, but from family papers I know that it must have been August, 1778. The manuscript ran as follows:—

“I am going to write down what has happened. It may be that no one will ever read what I write; but should this paper fall into the hands of any pitiful persons, surely they will grieve for us.

“Mr. Fairfax is a bad man. Heaven forgive me if I ought not to think him so! but I must needs say it here. My father says he is not worse than his neighbours, and that it is the habit of most gentlemen to drink and swear in his fashion. If it be so, it is an ill thing for women that have to bear therewith. My father is a poor curate in Stepton. He has as good blood in his veins as Mr. Fairfax himself; but then he is very poor, as I have said. My mother and Mrs. Fairfax were friends; and when Mrs. Fairfax died my mother took charge of the little baby she left, along with me. That baby was my Harry—Harry Fairfax of this Tower of Morcar’s. He and I learnt our first lessons together from my mother; and when we grew older my father taught us both. Old Mr. Fairfax took but small notice of his son. He was usually hunting, or quarrelling with some neighbour, or having drinking-bouts at the Tower. I will say it again—he is a bad man. I feared him much, he looked so big on his black horse; and he had a rough voice. I remember how Harry and I were gathering rushes to plait one day when he rode by on the narrow path that goes down to the white inn. The willows and rushes were high; but the black horse was so much taller that we could not hide, as we sought to do. Mr. Fairfax called out with a strange oath that sounded loud and terrible, and jeered at Harry for playing with the parson’s brat. Then he rode on; and Harry was in a great passion, the like of which I had not seen before. When I was fourteen my mother died, and thereafter I had to take charge of our house. Harry always came for teaching from my father; but he looked older than I did, for I had no money to buy myself new clothes, and was forced to continue in childish frocks when I might have worn gowns. At last an old and good friend of my father’s sent money wherewith to provide me with sundry needful things; and I remember that I was vexed because, when he saw me in my new attire, Harry did not kiss me, as was his wont. He loved books greatly, as did my father; and he hated wine and oaths, and all the evil doings at the Tower. Mr. Fairfax was angry, and called him a clerk; but he did not interfere with him. And by-and-by he loved something more than his books, and I could not believe that it was so. But it was true; and no creatures were happier than we when we sat among the osiers, and talked of what we would do by-and-by. Father was sorely troubled when Harry told him; but he was always reading, and had not time to think much of us. Besides, he loved Harry as his son, and all the more because he would not join in his father’s wicked ways. We were just twenty when Mr. Fairfax bade his son marry a young gentlewoman, whose father would dower her with certain lands that adjoined those of the Tower. When Harry refused, his father’s anger was very terrible; but as he gave no reason for his refusal, Mr. Fairfax let him go, thinking to persuade him in time, and with softer words. He, however, made speed to our house, and demanded that my father should marry us privately. This he would not hear of at first, though Harry urged it, saying it would be his safety—that Mr. Fairfax had even said the damsel’s brother should call him out did he slight her.

“He spoke so earnestly that at last father consented to make the needful arrangements, and we were satisfied. Alas! while he was absent, some rumour had come to Mr. Fairfax’s ear, and when Harry returned home he was made a prisoner in his room, and only allowed to issue from it for his meals. Mr. Fairfax thought to tame him, but he knew not that there was a device whereby he might be baffled. In bygone days, when Harry was fain to escape from noisy guests, he would slip out at the passage window; or if the brawlers were too near the stairs for him to pass, he would let himself down by a rope cunningly made fast to an iron bar that was across his own window. A thin and narrow plank was concealed below the grass at the edge of the moat, being held by rope loops to two pegs knocked into the bank. Once across the ditch, he was free, for the gentlemen were too busy within to espy him. Now, however, his father was always on the watch, fearing lest he should escape. We should have been in sore straits had we not had one friend among the servants—old Betty—who had seen my Harry born. She sped away to me with a message, bidding me to come at dusk, and Harry would meet me in the willow thicket across the moat: further than that he dared not venture.

“Was I wrong to go? I thought not; nay, I think still that I was right. Since the night that Harry put his signet-ring upon my finger I have belonged to him. How, then, could I dispute his will? Moreover, he was in trouble, and I could not refuse to go to him in his need. Therefore I went.

“When it was growing late, so that it behoved me to return, he led me to the edge of the thicket and kissed me; and that was our very last kiss on earth, yet I knew it not. I would I had known, that I might have stayed to perish with my love. I hurried along the darkening path, but before I had gone far I heard an angry voice that seemed to be that of Mr. Fairfax. I feared greatly for Harry, but I dared not turn back lest I should be seen and cause worse trouble, since it might well be that Mr. Fairfax was only speaking to some groom or labourer. All night I could not sleep for terror, and next day news was brought to my father that Harry had disappeared.

“The country was searched for him; but I knew he was dead, for had he been alive he would have found means to relieve my anxiety.

“Mr. Fairfax shut himself up, and drank hard; and after a few days he desired that the moat should be filled up.

“The work was begun, and that night I knew the reason.

“Again old Betty came to me, whitefaced and aged by many years. She told me the horrible thing that has never since been out of my thoughts. I see before me, day and night, the moat, the darkening path, and my Harry as he stepped off the plank and saw his father standing before him. Old Betty could not tell me what had passed, but Mr. Fairfax had seen me, for she heard my name.

“After many furious words, Harry said clearly, `I never will give her up!’ Then—then—that cruel man struck him hard on the temples with the handle of his heavy hunting whip. Harry fell back into the moat and he never rose again, Mr. Fairfax knelt at the edge and called him hoarsely, and when no answer came he rushed into the house.

“Betty was too terrified to say next day what she had seen, and I,—can I give up Harry’s father to punishment?—I who have been the cause of my husband’s death?”

. . . . .

The writing here became unsteady and indistinct, as though the poor girl’s mind had begun to wander. It is legible on the next leaf.

. . . . .

“People look at me strangely; they thought I did not hear to-day when some one said I was mad. Am I mad? No! I am sure I am not; my brain is quite clear, clearer than ever, and each thought is as bright as if it were written in flame. I know what I am going to do. The moat is not half full yet, but in a few more days there will be no room in it. I must get Betty to hide this paper for me in Harry’s panel cupboard; she taught him and me the trick of it long ago. I will not tell her why I want it hidden to-night; oh no, she might be afraid if she knew; and I must be quite alone, too. Mr. Fairfax is drinking—always drinking. I am, going to punish him; he shall have two deaths on his soul, two—two. God will never forgive him as much as that.

“I shall be safe with Harry; if anybody finds this they need not be afraid for me. I will fasten a stone over my heart that the water in the moat may hold me down tight till I find him.

“I will sign my own name to this—my name, that no one can rob me of now. Priscilla Fairfax.”

I determined, after reading this sorrowful tale, to have the moat carefully searched at the spot indicated by the spirit. That there might be no lack of witnesses, I invited both the doctor and curate of Stepton to be present. After reading the manuscript, they were to the full as anxious as I for further corroboration of its story. We knew that the Fairfax mentioned in it had died suddenly of delirium tremens, and probably the work of filling in the moat was then discontinued; for, as I have already remarked, it was of its original depth on one side of the house. As the workmen approached the bottom, they dug slowly and carefully. Complete success rewarded our efforts; for precisely where the ghost’s finger had pointed, we found the decayed and broken bones of a woman.

The doctor gathered them up with his own hands, and in doing so, turned over some of the earth, and espied, sunk in what had been soft mud, a heavy signet-ring bearing the Fairfax crest. Encouraged by our discoveries, I then gave orders for the whole of the moat to be cleared, in the hope that we might find the remains of the poor youth who was so cruelly murdered.

We inferred from the MS. that his room must have been at one of the corners farthest removed from the hall; and our conjecture proved true. We found some bones, singularly perfect considering their age, and two or three metal coat-buttons. The latter I have placed with the ring and manuscript in a cabinet. To the bones we gave decent burial, depositing them all in the same grave. Since that day no midnight footsteps have approached my chamber; and I trust that the uneasy spirit has found rest through the discovery of her fate, and that nothing more will be seen or heard of the Ghost of Morcar’s Tower.

Deserted Diners

Thu, 28 Nov 2024 17:00:00 +0000

In 1991, six of us chartered our favourite yacht, Sea Tramp, and sailed over to Alderney. When we arrived on Saturday afternoon after a seventeen hour crossing, we were eager to tuck into any food more substantial than sandwiches and Cup-A-Soups. We picked a restaurant near the harbour and grabbed a table. The restaurant was divided into several rooms. Our room contained our table and a larger table which had been empty when we arrived, but was soon filled with a party of eight as we enjoyed our starters.

The main course arrived, along with several wine bottles. As the conversation continued apace, we quickly got through all the wine with plenty of food remaining. We looked around for our waitress in order to request more, but no one was around.

At this point we noticed that the larger table was now empty. We hadn’t seen the people leave, and they definitely hadn’t finished before us. Their starters appeared to be only half consumed, and our envious eyes spotted that their wine bottles were still full.

While waiting for our waitress to reappear, we caught some flashing lights through a frosted window. Perhaps a disco had started up and the other diners had disappeared to take a quick peek? We were left hanging for another five minutes before our waitress reappeared, looking a bit flustered.

She explained that a rather large lady among the group of eight had got up to visit the toilets, and on the way back had collapsed in the corridor, blocking it completely. No one had been able to get past until the ambulance arrived and took her away. The other diners had followed as well.

We listened intently to the waitress’s story, establishing that the lady’s condition was serious enough for it to be unlikely that her companions would return to finish the meal. When the waitress left the room, we thought that enough concern had been shown, so we swapped our empty wine bottles for their full ones and carried on.

Indexing Blackwood's

Thu, 28 Nov 2024 16:31:21 +0000

I’ve been looking at the Internet Archive’s collection of issues of Blackwood’s Magazine, indexing them for the FictionMags Index. This job has been slowed considerably by discovering just how readable these magazines are. I’m not even just considering the amount of fiction they contained, but I’ve been reading fascinating, solid news articles about issues of the day, from 140 years ago.

The fiction in these magazines came from some of the biggest authors of the day, but the editorial policy of Blackwood’s was that all content was anonymous, with the exception of poetry. This, they said, not only allowed unknown authors of genius to shine, but also meant that well-known authors couldn’t submit poor material: everything had to pass on merit.

One of the short stories that struck my eye the other day was called The Factor’s Shooting. I couldn’t make head or tail of the title, but it became clear as I read on that a ‘factor’ is a Scottish term for the manager of an estate. The author was Gilfred W. Hartley, who was a hunter, climber and fisherman. I can picture him taking a break from stalking to sit in the heather and scribble the first draft of this story, which I much enjoyed.

The Factor’s Shooting 🔗

I am a factor. Or perhaps it would be more correct to say I was a factor, for at the present time I am without occupation. One day, two or three years ago, I set myself down to inquire carefully into my affairs. The problem to be solved was not a difficult one: Given a small capital on which it is impossible to live—granted a certain yearly deduction from it to pay bills with,—how long will it be before the capital vanishes away altogether? I found that this period would occur in about seven years, and the next day I announced to my friends that I was going to look out for “something to do.” I had had what is called a first-rate education: a long course of expensive schools and tutors had ended in Oxford, though I left that university without taking a degree. I could read and write and do easy sums; by the help of a “Liddell and Scott” and a grammar I could construe all but the hardest passages in Homer and Thucydides; and by making copious use of convenient spondee adjectives, I was capable of turning out immense quantities of correctly scanning Latin verse. My friends all said, “There will be no difficulty in a fellow like you getting a good berth,” and at first I shared their confidence. But as time wore on my hopes died away. To begin with, I considered myself debarred from certain kinds of work. Having been accustomed to country life, to freedom from noise and dirt and confinement, I determined that whatever happened I would have nothing to do with anything which would necessitate always living in a town. I had been ploughed for mathematics in “Smalls” and “Mods;” and all the hazy notions about papering rooms, or dividing apples and oranges in certain proportions amongst a given number of children, which once possessed my brain, had long ago deserted it, and I felt myself unequal both in inclination and capability to grapple with accounts. I had, of course, no money to invest in business, and pride prevented me from thinking of anything absolutely menial. As I look back, I sometimes wonder what kind of employment it was I did expect to meet with; but indeed, after a time, I ceased to have any expectations at all. My heart grew sick with waiting; small mean pecuniary troubles hemmed me in on every side—ever increasing in inverse ratio to my capital; anxious days followed on weary nights, and there were hopeless waitings for “something” to come by the post. Then my friends began to change their tone. They said, “You really ought to make an effort—we are afraid your education has been but a poor preparation for your future life.” I never could see that they took much trouble in looking out for “things” for me, or indeed did anything but give advice; but perhaps they worked in secret, and were ashamed of their good deeds seeing the light.

Whether this was so or not, there was no visible result, and matters were at their worst when I received an offer from an old Manchester merchant to take charge of a small property he owned in Scotland. I met this old gentleman on a railway journey, did him some small service in looking after his lost luggage, and afterwards in a moment of confidence told him of some of my difficulties. Then he mentioned his want of a factor, and asked for references as to my character and capabilities. I gave him the names of two old friends; and the answers they sent to his inquiries perplexed him so much, that he showed them to me and asked me what they meant. When I read the letters, I was not surprised at the old gentleman’s bewilderment—I could not understand them myself,—that is, I could not make out the meaning of the sentences, but I knew well enough why they were so mysteriously worded. It was evident that my friends, whilst unwilling to say anything definite against me, were determined to take no responsibility upon themselves; and they had succeeded so well that I would defy any lawyer or expert to attach any responsibility to them, or make out what they really meant. They told me afterwards (not knowing I had seen the correspondence) that they had given me an exceedingly good character; and I thought it best to affect ignorance and thank them, for I did not know how long it might be before I should again require their good offices—such as they were. Whether Mr. Weatherby (that was the merchant’s name) was deceived, or whether for some reason or other he really took a fancy to me, I don’t know—he gave me the offer of the place.

I had the vaguest ideas of the duties of a factor: as I look back, I must confess I was singularly ignorant of almost everything which belonged to such a post. Though I had spent much of my life in the country, I had done so to little purpose. I could shoot a little, and was an enthusiastic follower of all kinds of sport. But though health, pleasure, and in some desolate countries profit, is to be got by means of the gun, I could not help feeling that a practical knowledge of its use is not an indispensable qualification to a factor even in Scotland; and, considering the matter carefully over, it seemed my only one. I learnt, by-and-by, that it was part of the duty of a factor to look after woods. I could distinguish, as well as any man, the difference between a larch tree and a beech, or even between a larch and a Scotch fir. But a silver fir and a spruce seemed to me perfectly alike; and it was after carrying about little sprays of the two kinds with private marks of identity on them for a long time, and playing a kind of guessing game with them, that I was able to rightly name the one from the other. As to being able to distinguish between the timber of these trees when sawn up, I never could, and never shall, be able to do it. Some kinds of wood are to be told from other kinds by a smell of resin; but a Scotch factor cannot well go about smelling planks; and indeed it is not so easy to do naturally as one would think. I was aware that an agent should be more or less intimate with everything connected with land, on it or under it—subsoil, and crops, and cattle, and ploughs, and dairymaids, and pigeons; and I knew about none of these things. Like a distinguished northern politician, I thought all cattle “rather slack about the shoulder;” one plough was as another plough; one dairymaid seemed to me like other dairymaids, except that some were prettier.

I accepted the offer at once. In spite of this long list of negative qualifications, I never hesitated for a moment, I could not bear to face the reproaches of my friends at throwing away a chance. I trusted to practice, to books, to luck, to everything but myself. I remembered that a hundred years hence anything I might do would have been forgotten. I was sorry for Mr. Weatherby, but I closed rabidly and at once with his offer. As I have said, probably some prejudice in my favour, or some small compassion for my position, weighed with the latter. Being a townsman himself, he fancied that all country folk understood all about country matters; and he knew, of course, he could easily get rid of me if I turned out an unsatisfactory character.

I felt very grateful to the old man. He was in many ways difficult to deal with; and yet, on the whole, I did not get on badly with him; and I may say at once, though I have left his service, I did not do so on account of any proved incapacity on my part for the work. My great safeguard lay in this fact, that he was infinitely more ignorant than I was. If all matters appertaining to land were Greek to me, they were Chinese or Sanskrit to him. He called himself a cloth manufacturer; but I believe his principal business consisted in making bags for artificial manure, though he knew nothing whatever about the various ingredients which filled them. I have seen him carefully examine a pile standing at a station waiting to be trucked; he used to pat them complacently, and search, I thought, for some mark to identify them by. In his middle age he had rented a small bit of rabbit-shooting near Manchester. A year or two before I met him he had bought a small property in a large Scotch county, and he considered himself somewhat of an authority on sport. He may have known something about rabbits, but he was certainly singularly ignorant of all matters connected with grouse. When he got a point he always started off as hard as he could to it—either by the noise he made putting up the birds, or else arriving in such a state of breathlessness that he could do nothing with the easiest chance. If he wounded a hare (and he seldom killed one outright) he used to loo his old setter after it; and nothing pleased him more than a successfully conducted chase of this kind, for, as he said, the process combined the pleasure of shooting with the excitement of a course. And one day on getting a snipe he sent it off immediately to M‘Leay’s at Inverness to be stuffed. This old man was easily satisfied: two or three head per diem to his own gun contented him, and half-a-dozen made him triumphant; but when, as sometimes happened, he got nothing at all, he became despondent, and made me a kind of scapegoat to vent his disgust on. One day he took me out with him to the moor, and was at first much exercised to find that in shooting, at any rate, I was his superior: indeed, I feared he would not ask me again. But our united bag was naturally heavier than his single one. He always immediately claimed every bird which came down from a brood at which we had both fired, and I never disputed his right to do so—it was not for me as a Scotch factor to argue with my employer. When Mr. Weatherby found out this, he never went on the hill without me.

The property was not large considering it was in the Highlands. There was a big house, some 1500 acres of moor and wood, and two or three small arable farms lying between the latter and the great loch which formed the march on one side. I entered on my duties with fear and trembling; but as time wore on I became used to the position, acquired a certain amount of confidence in myself, and, on the whole, managed to get on pretty well. It is true I made some terrible mistakes—mistakes which caused me to feel uncomfortable then, but which make me blush now when I think of them sometimes in bed. I spoke to one of the tenants about putting a bandage on the fetlock of a cow; I very nearly bought some oats from another at 70s. a quarter; and I drove almost into frenzy the old man who acted as my lieutenant on the place by proposing to get the surplus water off some lea by drains seven feet deep and ten feet apart. As a rule, I got out of these holes of error. The blank astonishment in the worthy farmer’s face, when I offered him for his corn, told me I had made some mistake; and a search in Stephen’s ‘Book of the Farm,’ made it plain that such drainage as I contemplated would be equally bad for the land and the proprietor. Still now and then I went too far, and Mr. Weatherby suffered. He was, however, so ignorant himself, that I always managed without falsifying anything, or without falsifying to any great extent, to persuade him that all was right—that matters were as they ought to be.

In a measure, I soon got rather to like Mr. Weatherby. He had a sister who kept house for him, and I never could endure her. She was a vulgar, conceited woman, fond of snubbing me whenever she got a chance, and too apt, I thought, to treat me as a servant. Of course I was a servant in a way; but I knew that both by birth and education I was her superior. She could not keep her h’s in their proper places, much less make Latin verses; and I thought she might have shown me a little more consideration. I could not afford to quarrel with her openly, and I tried with all my might to affect to misunderstand her sometimes offensive insinuations. She made me go stupid messages which the servants could just as well have carried; and she even tried once to impress on her brother that it was part of my duty to get up and ring the big bell which was supposed to rouse the household—but he stood my friend in this matter, and though, as a rule, pretty much under the influence of his sister, peremptorily vetoed her suggestion.

I took up my abode in Scotland in January; in August the owner and his family arrived; and about the end of September he announced to me that he should be obliged to cut his stay shorter than he had intended and go South immediately.

“Stoney,” (that is my name) he said one morning, “business requires me to go to Manchester at once, and as it is late in the season, I shall hardly come back again this year. I should like you to send me a box of game about the middle of next month—five brace of grouse and two hares. You will find it perhaps difficult to get them without my aid, but you must do your best.” And then he added graciously, “You may shoot a grouse and a hare for yourself—a blue hare.” Those I had to send him were to be brown. From his cheerful countenance and measured language (when put out he always swore a good deal) I felt sure that the trade in manure-bags was looking up. Before he left he gave me many further directions as to the twelve head of game I was to send him. “And Stoney,” he said, “shoot as few hen birds as you can. I won’t have any hen birds killed; we can keep the cocks till they are tender.” “But,” I asked, “how am I to tell a cock from a hen when they are flying?” “You can distinguish them,” he replied, —“you can distinguish them—by—their woolly legs.” I knew that he knew as much about the sex of a grouse as about the moral character of a salmon, and I cheerfully promised. “And, Stoney,” he went on, “don’t disturb that stag. I won’t have that stag disturbed. If that old scoundrel who lives at” (making a fearful mess of the Gaelic name) “hunts that stag, I’ll turn him out of his farm.” “But he has a lease,” I ventured to interpose, “and there’s thirteen years of it to run, and you can’t turn him out.” Then Mr. Weatherby went off grunting into the house. The farmer was a peaceable old fellow, who had probably never used a gun in his life, and the “stag” was a roe which we had put up one day in going through a wood,

At last the day of departure arrived. I accompanied my employers across the loch to the little station, where they met the train which caught the night mail to the South. We had a big boat-load—servants, luggage, and Miss Weatherby,—herself no inconsiderable weight. As a last chance of making herself disagreeable, she ordered me, rather than asked me, to row. I think her heart softened a little just as the train was starting, for she put out her hand as if to say good-bye; but at that moment Lord Blackadder, the rich owner of a large deer-forest in the district, came out of the booking-office, and she hastily withdrew it, not wishing to appear on intimate terms with the factor before that nobleman. I could not help feeling rather triumphant when the great man shook hands with me (I had had an interview with him on some question of a disputed march), and spoke pleasantly to me. “You are going to be here for the winter, I suppose, Mr. Stoney. I don’t intend to kill any more stags this season; but there will be some hinds wanted about Christmas, and I have told Campbell, the head keeper, to let you know when they go after them.” I thought this very kind of Lord Blackadder, and thanked him. I saw Miss Weatherby hold half open the door of her carriage, I saw Lord Blackadder bow to her and get into another compartment further down, and as I watched the train twisting along the shore of the loch I rejoiced within me at the little snub.

When the train was out of sight I rowed home again. I well remember that row. The yellow and red and crimson beeches and larches which fringed the shores of the great loch were repeated in the water without their reflection being disturbed by a ripple. There was a haze in the distance, the sun shone brightly but with little power, and there was a pleasant smell of autumn and frost and dead leaves in the air. I looked with some pride and sense of proprietor-ship at the little territory over which I was to rule undisturbed for the next nine months. The stooks were still standing in the oat-fields close down by the loch: then there came the trimly squared pastures, each sheltered by its broad belt of wood; and above these the moor, brown now with its faded heather, stretched away for miles till it joined the distant haze. My eyes dwelt longest and with most affection on this moorland, for it was there dwelt the eleven grouse and three hares which I had been directed to slay.

I had made many good resolutions by the time I sculled the heavy old tub into the little landing-place,—that I would really work hard for Mr. Weatherby—harder than I had done before,—that I would make his interests my own,—that I would be courteous to cross old Maggie the housekeeper,—and finally, that I would not shoot more grouse than I had been ordered. Brimful of good intentions, I started directly I had moored the boat to the nearest farm to make an appointment for the next day with the tenant to measure some sheep drains we had been cutting on the hill. He was working amongst his corn: and as I went in at the top of the field I was greeted and startled by a loud whirring noise—a dozen grouse had been feeding on the stubble, and they flew back on to the moor, following carefully in their skimming flight every undulation of the ground. I went down to old Rory, the little farmer, and we chatted together for some time on diverse matters, but I made no appointment with him: I determined, though I made a feeble struggle in favour of the drains, to devote the next day to grouse. My conscience told me I was wrong in this. It is true, Mr. Weatherby had not told me not to go out the next day, but he had specified the time when he wanted the game,—a full fortnight hence. I made another attempt on the road home to conquer myself, and nearly turned back, after all, to speak to the farmer; but at that moment I was passing through the stooks, and I saw they were almost all within gunshot of the wall. Before going to bed that night, I in a measure salved my conscience by determining that the grouse I was to slay in the morning should be the grouse that rightly belonged to me, and no other; and having made this compact, I slept the sleep of the just. The morning was keen and bright; there was frost. The dahlias in front of the lodge were cut down by it, and the beds of heliotrope were withered and blackened. I knew that up on the moor the heather would be dry in an hour; and after having devoured hastily my oat-cake and bacon breakfast, I shouldered the gun and was off—feeling far more eager about this, my first attempt solus, than I had ever done when acting as bag-carrier and dog-beater to Mr. Weatherby. By ten I was far up on the moor: the men were working amongst the stooks, and there was nothing there. By eleven I had killed my grouse; the day was young—the best part of the ground was untouched—the brood to which my bird had belonged lay like stones,—and yet my work was over. I ought to have thrown all my cartridges into a peat-bog and run home as hard as I could. Alas! I threw away nothing but empty cases that day. The grouse all lay like stones that day; they lay too well. Everything favoured me—I found them easily—I knocked them over as I had never done before: double shots, snap-shots, long shots—it was all the same; down came a bunch of rich brown and black and russet feathers. I had no dog except a little skye terrier, and yet I never lost a bird. When I emptied out the contents of the bag at four o’clock, I was almost sick with fright at the display. Six and a half brace lay before me. I had killed on the very first day a brace more than the full allowance for the season for my employer and myself. Old cocks? Not they. I had never thought of the warning that had been given me—I had never looked for the woolly legs. Here was a pretty beginning,—a curious corollary to the resolutions scarcely twenty-four hours old. I had begun by intending to shoot one bird—my lawful bird; then I killed another in lieu of my lawful blue hare, and then I was very miserable; I felt no pleasure in looking at the bonnie dead birds.

I remembered how Christopher North had resuscitated the snipe by blowing down his neb, and longed for his power. What on earth was I to do with my spoil? I put a brace back into the game-bag, and the remainder I buried carefully in a moist peat-hag—eleven as fine grouse as ever man saw: plump, and in perfect plumage, and all with the woolly legs which my master considered the characteristic of a cock. Two pounds’ worth of grouse did I stick into that slimy hole, and hate myself for doing so; but no other course lay open to me. I dared not send them away, and Maggie would have betrayed me if I had taken them home. As I lay awake that night, I felt a great change had come over my moral character. Only a few hours had passed since I had been brimming over with virtuous self-complacency. A few hours had changed all. I was a poacher; I had betrayed the trust of my master. I was a coward for burying the birds in a bog—nay, I almost felt as if I was a liar; for I had half made up my mind, as I came down the hill, to account for my many shots by saying I had been firing at a mark. No one had questioned me. But then my uneasy conscience began to inquire whether the intention was not of as much value as the act; and while debating this nice point I fell asleep.

It would not be profitable in any sense to give a daily account of what I did on the moor between that day and the 10th of December. I was often on it. There was not very much work for me on the place, but to a certain extent I neglected what there was to do if I thought I should have any luck on the hill. I tried sometimes to resist the fascinations of the sport; but I think I must be a little weak-willed—at any rate in that particular direction—for I hardly ever did ultimately fight the temptation successfully. Perhaps I might have succeeded better if it had not been for those fatal stubble-fields. The grouse used to come down every afternoon and feed—confiding things!—within gunshot of the walls. About 3 p.m, they used to arrive—not many, for there were not many on the place, About 3.5 they used to fly off again—some of them; and some would be sprawling on the crisp stubble, or lying quiet in brown feathery masses. The end of this kind of thing was that I did serious injury to the shooting—I almost destroyed it. The marches were narrow, the grouse naturally few. They were exceedingly greedy birds; like myself, they gave way readily to temptation, and the penalty they paid for their sensuality was a heavy one. I consider, if the season had lasted ten days or a fortnight longer, that the Tetrao Scoticus would have become extinct so far as that moor was concerned. As it was, a few wary old cocks and one small brood alone escaped.

It will naturally be supposed that this kind of work could not be carried on altogether in secret. Wood-pigeons and crows might account for the firing, and I avoided the farm-folk as much as possible. If ever I enter the diplomatic service, the experience I gained in dealing with the people on this Scotch place will be invaluable to me. And I used to crouch, to lie down, to assimilate my shape to that of a tree, to pay particular attention to the colour of a background. The shepherd must have had a pretty good idea of what went on on the moor. But the shepherd hated Mr. Weatherby, who had called him a damned old woman one day, when certain holes in his little hut’s walls had been pointed out and complained of; and I used to give him tobacco and whisky sometimes, and let him help himself liberally to firewood. This man was solemn and reputedly devout; he had an acrid and severe countenance, and he was wifeless. This latter state greatly encouraged me to hope that he would be silent.

I harried the place shamefully, and what grouse were left had good cause to bless the sun which rose on the 11th of December. As for the “stag,” I met him one evening when coming home from the hill in the dusk, and fired two barrels of small-shot at him; and the poor beast was found a week after in the wood, dead and wasted.

So came Christmas; after which festive period, spent by me rather dismally in thinking of my sins, and wondering whether I should be found out, I got a companion at the lodge. I advertised in the ‘Field’ for a pupil; and though when I got an application I was almost frightened at my audacity, the man who made it came. Perhaps he was lured by the good fishing which formed a part of the advertisement. For a time I tried to make him do a little work. I set him down to the estate account-book one day, and persuaded him to make a copy of it, as an example of what such things should be; but he detected a mistake in my adding up in the second or third page, and after that I left him alone so far as money matters were concerned. We both fished a good deal in the loch, and in the small burn which ran through the property; and I should have had a pleasant spring, if it had not been for the fact that summer came next. As the months sped on, I became more and more alarmed. As a proof of how easy it is for a tolerably virtuous young man to become at short notice something distinctly the reverse, I may mention that at one time I seriously contemplated setting the heather on fire just before the season for muirburn ended—of course accidentally—and burning the whole of it; but I discovered in time that such an act is looked on by the law as a criminal offence, and is punished by a long term of imprisonment.

Before Christmas, Lord Blackadder’s keeper had come over to tell me of a hind-drive he was contemplating; and I went into the forest for a short visit, and had a pleasant time of it with the jovial gillies. We were on the hills all day, slept at night in a remote and lonely lodge, feasted on fresh venison-steaks, and scones, and whisky, and in the evening played “catch the ten” with indescribably dirty packs of cards, or “puss in the corner” with bonnie rosy-cheeked maidens. I never myself got any hinds, for they always seemed to come awkwardly to the places where I was posted; but I enjoyed the “puss in the corner” very much. I was, however, startled, when saying good-bye to the head-keeper, at a remark he made—“You’ll no’ be having many birds o’ your groun’ for the season?” “Oh, Campbell,” I said, “what makes you think that?” “Oh, it’s the weather,” he replied; “these black frosts is clean bad for the breeding.” This happened before Christmas, and I felt sure grouse would not be thinking of such a thing; but there was a queer look in his eye when he spoke which made me suspect, early as it was, that he had paid a visit to some black bottle; and I was sorry for this, as Campbell was reputed a steady man, and much respected by his master on that account. “Oh no,” he said again; “I’m afraid you’ll no’ make a very heavy bag on Rhian the year.”

Summer drew near. It was evident that I was not altogether hardened into crime, for by the end of July I could not sleep at night, and on the first day of August I took Robert (the pupil) into my confidence. He was a nice open lad. We had got on together very well, and he seemed thoroughly to appreciate the difficulties of my situation. He was quite willing to do anything he could to help; but for a long time I did not see how we could do anything, and I resolved to let matters take their course. Old Mr. Weatherby had been unwell during the summer, and at one time I thought my difficulties would be solved by his not being able to come North at all; but shortly before the Twelfth, he wrote saying he was much better, and intended finishing his cure in Scotland. He added he was much pleased to see by the papers that the grouse in our district were strong and plentiful. I wrote in a great hurry to say that this was not at all the case with us, and that the breeding season had been a very bad one (which was a perfectly true statement); but the letter had no effect in changing his resolution, and on the 10th he and his sister and household arrived.

It was with very different feelings that I once more acted as stroke in the family boat, and started for the station. On the way I firmly made up my mind to confess everything. I knew that the grouse all round us were plentiful; the oldest inhabitant could not remember a better nesting season. But I had acted as the French sportsman did who killed the hares “Desdemone” and “Alphonse,” and left only “le vieux Achille” to breed. I had depopulated the ground.

My employer was looking out of the train as it drew up: his face had lost its ruddiness, and altogether he was feebler than when I last saw him. He was very gracious, and seemed delighted to be once more in Scotland. The sight of his gun-cases and a new setter almost made me sick. There was no time then to explain matters, and long before we reached the landing-place I once more changed my mind. I could not explain things. Mr. Weatherby asked many questions about the grouse, and I gave blurred, indistinct answers to some, whilst others I pretended not to hear, and laboured most diligently at the oar. The lapse of another year had not improved the temper of his sister, and what little she did say was disagreeable.

Robert and I had moved out of the big house to a small cottage close by; and as we were sitting by the smouldering peat before going to bed that night, I made a proposition to him. There is a kind of sport to be witnessed amongst the fells of Cumberland which is hardly known in other counties. It consists in dragging a skin steeped in aniseed across country for ten or a dozen miles, for dogs to hunt. This is called a “hound-trail.” It takes place after wrestling-matches and pigeon-shootings and shows, and causes great delight to the sturdy sport-loving northern farmers. I told Robert of this, and asked him if he would be willing to go up on to the hill early in the morning of the Twelfth, and put such a skin down here and there; and I explained to him that the dogs would scent it, and work about as if after game, whilst, as Mr. Weatherby was short-sighted, we might be able to induce him to believe that the birds had run and got up farther on,—that if this was carried out two or three times, his disgust at their behaviour, and his weakness from his recent illness, might prevent him going out much more. Robert, after a little demur, agreed to perform his part; and the next morning, under the pretext of getting some remedy for toothache, I went to the little town and bought some of the strong-smelling drug.

It was not with much confidence that I embarked in this desperate course, but it was just possible that it might hoodwink Mr. Weatherby. I knew his extreme ignorance on all matters connected with game. I bethought me of how, the last season, he had perpetually fired at small birds in mistake for snipe; how he had taken a roe for a red deer, an old carrion-crow for a black-cock; how, when he had tumbled head over heels into a peat-hag, and plugged up both barrels with black earth, he had wished to clear them by firing his cartridges; and how he had only been saved from destruction by my interposition. I remembered all this, and determined that it was worth while to run the risk; I could not make things much worse than they were. I gave the shepherd a pair of old boots and half a pound of tobacco, prayed heartily for a stormy morrow, and went to bed in a most unenviable state of mind.

Uneasy snatches of sleep were all I was able to secure; and at a very early hour I awoke Robert, and started him off with his rabbit-skin and little bottle, giving him many and minute instructions as to what he was to do.

Ah! if my conscience had been easy, how glad I should have been at the look of that morning! It was one of those early autumn days which give promise of heat: a heavy dew lay over everything. Robert left broad footprints as he crossed the lawn, and destroyed myriads of gossamer and sparkling spider webs.

There was the usual delay in making a start, the usual collecting of cartridge-bags and flasks, and about ten Mr. Weatherby and myself and the shepherd stood at the gate which opened on to the first bit of moorland. The former was full of cheerful anticipations: my mind, though I acted my part as well as I could, was filled with most dismal forebodings. I experienced, in an intensified form, the feelings of a schoolboy who is called up for a lesson he has not prepared: perhaps the thoughts of a clerk submitting falsified accounts to his employer would be still nearer akin to mine. What the shepherd thought I do not know; his sour face was unreadable by me. I had tried to persuade the old merchant that he (the shepherd) would be an unnecessary encumbrance, and that I could easily carry all the game myself—how easily none but I knew; but Mr. Weatherby was obstinate. He insisted on our both taking enormous game-bags. I thought of the whisky, and tobacco, and firewood, and boots for which the shepherd was indebted to me, and fervently trusted that he did the same. I had expected Robert home before we started, but he had not made his appearance. The setters were let loose, and in three minutes they ran into a brace of grouse. My mind was so occupied and anxious that my fingers were unready, and I missed. Not so Mr. Weatherby. To the great surprise of the shepherd and myself and the dogs—certainly to his own—he knocked over a bird. He was jubilant: he laughed at my dismal forebodings; he chaffed me for my bad shooting; he brought out his flask and gave us both a small mouthful of whisky “to wet the luck;” he prophesied an enormous bag, and then he ordered an advance.

I knew those two old birds: I may almost say I knew them by sight, and probably they were as well “acquaint” with me. Many a time had I tried in the previous autumn to circumvent them, and only superior cunning on their part had saved them.

So we went deep into the moor: we waded through rich blooming heather; we passed by rushy patches, and green burns, and sunny hillocks, where grouse used to love to lie, and it was all as a city of the dead. Mr. Weatherby got hot and fidgety, and tired, and finally cross. He insisted on taking his own course, and would not be guided by my advice, and so we wandered a mile from the place where I had told Robert to cast off. The shepherd’s face told nothing—he acted as “Brer” Fox did in the American story, “he lay low.” I was wondering what on earth had become of Robert, and was picturing to myself that self-sacrificing individual stuck in a bog or drowning in a burn, when a loud To-ho! startled me. I saw Dash and Meg standing rigid about a hundred yards off, and Mr. Weatherby starting after them as hard as he could go. I was too much accustomed to this proceeding to be much surprised at it. In defiant opposition to all the rules of shooting, the old bag-merchant ran furiously towards his dogs. Whenever he had a little breath to spare he shouted loudly To-ho!—though to all appearance the setters never meant to move again. He reached them in his usual state of mind and body—blown, shaking, and done.

Nothing got up: the dogs refused to budge an inch. I encouraged them, and patted them, and pushed them, and then their master kicked them, but they would not move.

“He has been here and made the stuff too strong,” I thought, and I almost fancied I could smell it myself. Mr. Weatherby began to swear and hammer the dogs with his gun; and the shepherd—“he lay low.”

Suddenly the animals began to move—to draw; we stood round and watched them with much solemnity and anxiety: with slow and stately step and great rigidity of body they advanced, and we followed. Mr. Weatherby, with his forefinger on his right trigger; I with my hammers down, half expecting to see Robert jump up out of a bunch of heather and run for it; and the shepherd with his stick held like a gun, ready to use in a moment. The dogs went steadily on and on. “They’ve run,” said Mr. Weatherby in a hoarse and excited whisper; “head them, Stoney.” So I made a circuit and met the party, and, miserable as I was, could hardly keep from laughing aloud at the appearance it presented to one who was behind the scenes.

The funeral march of the dogs was gradually exchanged for a quicker step. They began at length to trot, to sniff in an excited manner here and there. Then they threw up their heads, they stretched their tails out straight behind them, and set off across the moor; Dash began to “whumper,” and Meg fairly “yowled.” Now and then they were hidden for a few seconds by a hillock, but they soon reappeared. They took a bee-line across the heather; we watched them cross the march, grind up the opposite slope, and then they faded from our view. Talk of a hound-trail—none better was ever seen amongst the fells of Cumberland.

I stared blankly in the direction the dogs had gone. I did not dare to look at Mr. Weatherby; he broke out into a storm of fury, and condemned the dogs, and myself, and the shepherd, and the moor, to the hottest place he could think of. I said nothing in answer to all this—only looked at the shepherd; and the shepherd—“he lay low.”

The bag consisted of one grouse that Twelfth. If the dogs had re-appeared on the scene by the time we reached home, I think there would have been two setters added to the total; but they did not. I left Mr. Weatherby when near the lodge, telling him the toothache had come on again, and flew to my small dwelling.

There, sitting in the last stage of exhaustion on his bed, was Robert. He was dirty to a degree, and neither his knickerbockers nor stockings showed any signs of their original colours. There was an awful smell of aniseed in the room. It appeared that he had safely reached the place where the scent was to be laid first, and had just arranged the rabbit-skin to his satisfaction, when he became aware of a man crouching down at some little distance, and evidently watching him. Robert said at first that he had walked slowly away, but afterwards admitted he had perhaps run a little, and I soon found out that he had run a great deal. The man started in pursuit, and Robert made the best of his way across the moor. But after proceeding with great rapidity for some time he tumbled over a tump of grass, and the bottle of aniseed, which he had put for safety in his trousers-pocket, was broken in the fall. He said that this was perhaps what the dogs had been hunting,—and I thought so too: I could have given him an hour’s start, and hunted him with great ease myself—he smelt as if he had been dipped in aniseed.

I had barely time to take in all this, still less elaborate any plan for the future, when there was a knock at the door, and, without waiting for an answer, in came a man—the shepherd. He sniffed once or twice with great noise and deliberation, and I thought he grinned, and then he said—

“The maister’s waiting to see Mistar Rowbert in the Leebrary.”

Robert’s face was too dirty to get white, but his lips quivered as they formed the word “Now?”

“Ay, the noo—at wanst,” said the shepherd.

“I’ll just change my clothes first, I think,” said the agitated Robert. “I’ve—I’ve—had a little—accident, shepherd.”

Once more there seemed a curious struggle in that individual’s countenance between austerity and mirth, and again he loudly scented the air. He gave no reprieve. “But he’s waiting,” he said; and he almost button-holed the reluctant lad, and took him out of the room.

I had a terrible foreboding as to who that watcher on the moor had been. After a decent interval, I followed the two to the house, and, as I had had no time to communicate with my friend, and was quite ignorant of what he was going to say, I thought it wise to get into the middle of a laurel-bush which stood just opposite the window and garden-door of Mr. Weatherby’s smoking-room. I was disappointed in my plan, for I could hear nothing articulate; indeed, after a few minutes, I doubt if there was anything articulate to hear. For a short time I could hear nothing at all, but I knew Robert was in the room, and had gone in by that door,—I could smell him.

Then I heard a loud voice, a stuttering, stammering vociferation, the sound of a struggle, the breakage of something brittle, a plaintive cry in a different key, and then the door was thrown violently open. I, crouching in the laurel-bush, watched. Robert came out first. I saw Mr. Weatherby had him by what seemed the skin of his neck. Breathless, I saw the old bag-merchant poise himself on one leg, and then I experienced a violent concussion in my leafy hiding-place,—the plotter and the tool met in the laurel-bush. Robert’s ideas had been very much confused by his day’s work, especially by the last part of it, and I think when he saw me he imagined that Mr. Weatherby had somehow managed to run round the bush to meet him and kick him again: he jumped back with the greatest possible alacrity, and fled like a hare down the avenue.

I instinctively shrank closer to the ground: the old man saw the movement. With what I can only call a howl, he sprang at me; but I was too nimble for him. No one ever ran, or ever will run, faster from that house than I did that fatal day. I upset Miss Weatherby, who was coming up from the farm, and left her sitting wildly gesticulating amongst dozens of broken eggs. I soon distanced her brother, and got out of his territory. I spent a miserable night at a little inn, miles off; and after hovering about the next day, trying to make up my mind to venture back for some clothes, I gave it up, and left that hilly country for good.

It is but justice to Mr. Weatherby to say that he sent me my personal effects, and what he called my “wages.” I have never seen him since, or been within a hundred miles of him; but I understand that the sanctimonious shepherd has taken the place of the amateur factor.

Gibbet Hill

Tue, 22 Oct 2024 17:09:59 +0100

The following short story by Bram Stoker was published in the Christmas Supplement of the Dublin edition of the Daily Express on 17 December 1890.

Gibbet Hill 🔗

When I left the Royal Huts Inn, on the top of Hind Head, in order to visit the Devil’s Punchbowl and Gibbet Hill, immortalized by Turner in the Liber Studiorum, I passed along a wide straight road—the new high road between London and Portsmouth—and shortly came to the edge of the Punchbowl and casted my eyes on its beauty. The fog, which had been heavy in London when I left on this mid-October morning, extended even to Haslemere and hung in the valleys so that the tops of the Surrey hills rose like islands from the sea of mist, and in the brilliant sunshine which glorified these upper levels softened and mellowed all the wide expanse of hill and dale and down which ranged between me and the Southern coast. The hill gave steeply on all sides save the north-west, where the circular valley opened to the plain below. All the summer tints were chastened and mellowed; all the full colours which the sunshine had glorified had faded into the sere of Autumn. The pink and purple of the heather were changed to a brown with only a suggestion of faded colour to warm its tone. The bracken was of rich amber and faded yellow, and the myriads of grasses and wild flowers had donned their winter garb—the hues of decay. Through all this rich mass of Autumn tints, the broom, untouched as yet by the frost, sent an emerald flash. The green bushes which fringed the tiny stream running through the valley seemed of supernatural vividness, and the dark green of the pines which covered the western slope and ran down into the valley seemed to assert in some positive way the right of nature to maintain her own colour despite all influences. Away to the north and west, past the spurs and shoulders of the hill, the woods and valleys, the copses and villages and hills and ridges ranged in endless succession; and it was after a long, long pause that I turned from drinking in the beauty of the scene with my heart full of the power and majesty and purifying influence of nature’s beauty. “Here at least,” said I to myself, “the soul of man is elevated; and on this higher plane of nature’s handiwork the evil of our hearts is lulled.”

As I turned, however, I started, for, as if by the irony of fate, there, beside me, was a grim memorial of man’s wickedness and lust for blood—a tombstone by the roadside, marking the spot where a century ago a poor seaman trudging on his way from Portsmouth was murdered.

But not the stone only was of interest; for by it were three figures which would have arrested attention anywhere. They were only children, but of types that were not common. Two were young Indian girls of an age which by the slower development of English girlhood would be about some thirteen or fourteen years; being, however, of Eastern birth, they were probably much younger. They stood one on each side of the memorial stone, looking almost like heraldic supporters, as each with a slim brown hand resting on an elbow of the stone, leaned her face on the hand while looking at me gravely with long, dark, fathomless eyes. They were both very pretty of their type, and their slim girlish figures were draped in black of some shimmering material, made in a half Eastern fashion with a wide belt of the stuff around the waist, and some kind of dark material wound around the head and acting as a head gear. The third of the group was a little boy of some ten years old, with hair of spun gold, eyes like blue porcelain, and a winning smile on his rosy face. One might designate him indifferently a Cupid or an angel. He was dressed in a dark blood-coloured tunic.

For a few seconds I stood looking at this group, they regarding me steadfastly without the slightest movement. Then I spoke to them, making some remark about the beauty of the scene. One of the girls said, tapping the stone with her hand as spoke.

“Can you tell us anything about this stone, Sir? We are strangers.”

“I am a stranger here myself, but I think we will find it here,” I answered, as I proceeded to read the inscription, which is on both sides of the stone. When I read of the word murder they all three looked at each other and then at me, and shuddered, and, strange to say, followed the shudder with a smile. I thought they might be frightened, and I hastened to add—“But you need not let this disturb you. It all happened a hundred years ago, when the country was very different from what it is now.” One of the girls said in a low voice, whose tones were peculiarly penetrating:

“I hope not—I trust not;” and the little boy looked up at me with a laugh and said

“I suppose if there were a murder now some one would be stuck up on Gibbet Hill!”

“Hullo! young man,” said I, “You know all about it, I see. I am going up to the hill top to see the Memorial Cross. Will you come and see where they put the murderer?”

“With pleasure,” he said, with an air of almost supernatural gravity, lifting his cap in acknowledgment of my invitation. The girls bowed too, and we all moved up the hill together. As we went I noticed that the boy had one of his hands tightly clenched. “What have you got there?” I asked of him.

“These!” he said, opening his hand and showing me a crumpled mass of great earthworms, wriggling in their sudden freedom. “I love worms,” he went on. “See! they wriggle so, and you can pull them out long!” and he illustrated the latter fact.

“Poor worms,” said I, “Why not let them go? They would much rather be on the ground.”

“Shan’t,” was his only reply, as he shoved them into the folds of his tunic.

There were a lot of persons at the cross when we reached the top of Gibbet Hill, besides abundant evidence of recent visitors in the shape of egg-shells and pieces of newspaper—for the cross is a favourite picnicing spot. Amongst the strangers my fancy was chiefly taken by a lady and gentleman whom I dubbed “the honeymoon couple.” I soon became so absorbed by the lovely view which lay stretched before me—a wilderness of rising hill-tops with green woods and rich valleys—that I quite forgot my young companions. I went to the edge of the steep hill and sat down looking eastwards, and lost myself in the beauty of the scene.

Presently I remembered my young companions, and looked around for them; but they had quite disappeared: there was not a sight of them anywhere around.

My departure from London had been early, and the walk from Haslemere in the blazing October sun a little fatiguing, so, after a while, when I had been all around the summit of the Head and had, so to speak, boxed the scenic compass, I took my way to a deep shady grove of hazel and beech with tall pines rising over all—one of those dense copses that creep up from the valley, throwing jagged spikes of greenery up the slopes of the hill. Here there was the very perfection of autumn fullness. The undergrowth grew luxuriantly under the shelter of the clustering pines. The brown of the bark and the blueish bloom of the foliage of the pines, as one gazed into the half dim aisles between them—the sweet aromatic odour which they exhaled—the sleepy silence, accentuated only by the hum of nature’s myriad vitalities—the soft, rich grass, whose summer greenery stood untouched as yet in this sheltered dell—all invited to repose. With a blissful feeling of content I stretched myself on the grass, and soon lost my thoughts and my consciousness in the interlaced branches above me.

How long I slept I know not; but it must have been a good while, for I felt thoroughly refreshed as to brain, and with that half-aching sense of cramped muscles which comes after a long period of unchanged attitude; and there was over me that mysterious sense of elapsed time which tells philosophers that our thought is continuous in some form or another. There was, however, no sense of duty omitted—no press of coming work, which in such cases destroys the charm of awaking. I knew that there was ample time before me, and that I might muse on, unchecked, that I could revel to my heart’s content in the sense of freedom, and enjoy the freshness and purity of the air in this wonderful spot.

And so I did not stir, but lay on my back with my hands under my head looking up into the branches and watching the gleams of light struggle through the tracery of leaf and branch. I thought of many things, in that luxurious half-dreamy way which belongs to the leisure of an habitually busy man. Taking up a thread of thought and dropping it again—swaying between general and particular ideas—in all ways realizing that greatest of pleasures, intellectual laissez aller.

There was in the air the same faint hum of varied sounds which had at first lulled me to sleep; but somehow the volume was richer than before—more full and satisfying to the ear, and with a special significance, as if not only all nature was speaking but that there was some one voice amongst the myriad more potent than the rest. I listened with a growing interest, and the sound seemed to take a more definite place amongst nature’s harmonies. It was not as if it grew in loudness, but merely as if the vibrations accumulated, coming in waves more quickly than they could die away.

Gradually all the other noises seemed to die away, and I heard only this one sound. It seemed to be closer and closer as I began to distinguish more clearly, until I shortly came to the conclusion that its source was separated from me by only some score of yards. Then I began to be able to analyse it a little. In general effect it was like a sort of musical muffled corncrake—a corncrake in whisper—but with some subtle prevailing sweetness which seemed of almost irresistible attraction. Presently I raised my head from amongst the bracken where I lay, and looked whence the sound proceeded.

There, to my surprise, in an open dell where the light fell through a break in the trees were grouped the children whom I had seen. The two girls were seated, and between them the little boy stood up. One of the girls held in her left hand something which looked like a set of pandean pipes made of thin canes but slightly thicker than wheaten straws. Across this she drew something attached to her fingers of the right hand, which made the bass of the strange corncrake sound. The other girl held a shell with strings across it which she touched lightly; and the boy had a sort of reed flute which gave forth a peculiarly long sweet note, but which blended in the mass of music. Then the girls joined in a sort of monotonous chant of strange sweetness but very, very faint. They were all three looking well to one side of me. By and by the girls stood up; they all turned slightly, and I could see that they were evidently turning slowly in a complete circle, as though seeking in every direction around them. As they began to face my direction I sank down again into the bracken so that they might not see me, for the affair began to absorb my interest. I took care, however, to peep through the fronds of the bracken and see all that went on. A very short time elapsed before my attention was diverted, and in not the most pleasant of ways.

Hearing a stir and rustle among the dead leaves beside me I looked round, and almost jumped to my feet, for there close by, and approaching closer, was a large snake of the blindworm species. It came straight towards me and actually passed over my feet. I did not stir, and it went on, heeding me no more than if I had been a log of wood, and wriggled away towards the group in the sunlit glade. It was evidently attracted by the strange, weird music, and as this was my first actual experience of serpent-charming my interest grew, and I watched the little party more closely than before. They went on with their music, and the snake approached closer and closer; till at the feet of the fair-haired child it stopped, and, curling itself into a spiral, raised its head and began to hiss. The boy looked down, and the girls turned their eyes towards him, but the music did not stop for a moment; on the contrary, it grew something quicker. Then the snake twined itself around the child’s ankle and began to climb its way up his body, wriggling round and round his leg and thigh, and up and up, till at last it crawled along the arm that held the flute.

Then, suddenly, the music stopped. The two girls stood up, and the boy stretched out his arm with the snake wound around it, with his hand stretched out wide open, the palm upwards. The snake remained perfectly still, as if transformed into stone. Then the girls took hands and circled slowly around the boy, uttering a low, whispering, mysterious chant, something the same as the earlier one, but this time in decrescendo as compared with the former crescendo, and in a minor key. This went on for quite two or three minutes. The boy remained perfectly still, with his arm extended, and his blue eyes fixed on the snake. Then the latter raised its head slightly and seemed to follow with it the movements of the circling girls. They continued their slow movement, round and round, the snake’s movements being more and more pronounced with each revolution, till presently it was boldly turning, like the automatic motion of a firework, around the boy’s arm. Gradually the motion of the girls got slower and that of the snake correspondingly less, till, presently, the girls’ movement, and the low crooning music, which had never stopped, died away altogether, and the snake hung, a dead mass as limp as a piece of string, across the boy’s hand. The boy never moved, but the girls let go each others’ hands, and one of them, who had stopped just in front of the boy, took the snake by head and tail and seemed to gently pull it out straight. When she let it go it lay across the boy’s hand as stiff as a piece of wood. There was something uncanny about this which recalled to me recollections of a man whom I had once seen in a cataleptic fit, and whose body retained any position into which it was put, no matter how grotesque or how uncomfortable or strained. The snake seemed to be under some similar condition, and with strange curiosity I awaited the next development. The boy continued impassive, his hand still stretched out and the snake resting across it. The girls stood a little in front of and on either side of him, so that the outstretched hand was midway between them.

Then began some questioning between them in a language which I presumed to be some form of Indian, but which I did not understand. Both voices were sweet, with a peculiar penetrating power, but one of them I seemed instinctively to fear, although it was the sweeter and softer of the two. Somehow—and the idea was quite spontaneous—it seemed to suggest murder. From the tones and inflections of the voices I gathered that all utterances were put in the form of questions—a supposition shortly confirmed in a strange way, for the answers were given by the rigid snake. When each girl in turn had had her say—and they suggested positive and negative in their tones—the snake would slowly turn around like the needle in a compass, and point its head to either one. The sweeter voice seemed to be the positive, and the other the negative in the inquiry; and in all the earlier questions the snake, after turning slowly around, remained with its head towards the negative. This first seemed to disturb and then annoy the positive inquirer, and her voice grew more deadly sweet and penetrating until it made me shudder. Then she seemed to get more and more enraged, for her eyes gleamed with a dark unholy light, and at the last came her question in a keen thrilling whisper. For answer the snake then spun round quicker and quicker, and suddenly came to a dead stop in front of the other girl.

The disappointed one gave one fierce, short, sharp sound like a dog’s bark, whilst a look of deadly malice swept over her face; and then passed away, leaving it as serene as before. At the same instant the rigidity of the snake collapsed, and it hung for an instant as limp as before, and then slipped to the ground, and lay there all in a heap without motion, as if dead. The boy started, as though from sleep to waking, and began to laugh. The girls joined in the cachinnation, and in an instant the glade, which had seemed so weird, grew instinct with laughter, as the children chased each other into the recesses of the wood, and disappeared from view.

Then I rose up from the bracken where I lay. I could hardly believe my eyes, and thought that I must have been sleeping, and have dreamt it all. But there lay the seemingly dead snake before me as a palpable evidence that I had beheld a reality.

The sun was far in the west when I had finished my stroll through the laneways and copses upon the Witley side of Hind Head and found myself once more at its highest point on Gibbet Hill.

The place was now deserted. The picnicers had all gone home; the pony traps and donkeys and parties of school children had disappeared, and nothing remained of the day’s visitation but the usual increase in old newspapers and broken egg shells. As the light was just beginning to fade and the air to grow a shade colder, the sense of loneliness was more than ever marked. But I had come from the midst of the hum and turmoil of the city to enjoy this very loneliness, and its luxury was to me unspeakable. Down in the valleys the mist still lay dim and fleecy white, and from it the hill tops rose dark and grim. A belt of cloud fringed the whole horizon, and above it stretched a sea of sulphur yellow, flecked here and there with little clouds of white which, swimming high above the level of the hill, caught the last splendours of the sun, now obscured by the horizon. One or two stars began to twinkle through the darkening sky, and a stillness that seemed sentient stole up through the valley and reached to where I sat.

Then the air grew colder, and the silence became perfect. The stars swam out into the sky, which had now a darker blue, and a soft light fell on the scene. I sat on and on, and drank in the wondrous beauty in which I was immersed. Weariness of mind and body seemed of the dim past, and as if they could never again be other than a sad memory. In such moments a man seems almost to be born again, and to have every faculty renewed to the full. I leaned with my back against the great stone cross, and, putting my hands behind me, clasped my arms around its back so as to change my position and be able to enjoy more fully the luxury of rest.

Suddenly, without a word of warning, each hand was grasped from behind and held tight in a pair of hands, thin and warm but so strong that I could make no movement; and at the same time a scarf or shawl of some light, fleecy, but thick material was thrown over my face and drawn tightly from behind, holding my head close to the stone. So pinioned and gagged, I could neither move nor speak, and had perforce to await the coming events. Then my hands were tied with a string put around my wrists and drawn tight, so that I was fixed more firmly than before. I could hear no sound, and took it for granted that I was being prepared for robbery. I was alone, far away from everyone and in the hands of men stronger than I was myself, and so resigned myself to the situation as well as I could—secretly thankful that I had only a small sum of money with me. After a time which seemed long, but which was probably of but a few minutes’ duration, the scarf was pulled down so far that my eyes were free, though my mouth was still covered and I was unable to cry out.

For a few moments I was too much surprised even to think as strange what I saw before me. Instead of burly footpads with rude manner and coarse force, there were the three children who had arrested my attention earlier in the day. They stood before me perfectly still and silent for a little while, their eyes being the only features which expressed either consciousness or interest or any kind. Two of them, the boy and one girl, then smiled on me with an amused superiority, whilst the other—she who in the glade had exhibited such anger—smiled with a deadly cold hate which, bound as I was, made me shudder. This latter then approached me closer, the others remaining quite still and looking on with their superior amused smile. She took from her waist, where it was concealed in the folds of her dress, a long sharp dagger, thin, double-edged, and lethal-looking. This she proceeded to flourish before me with extraordinary dexterity and rapidity. Half the time its keen edge actually touched my skin, and the contact made me wince. Anon she would dart towards my eyes till I could feel its cold point actually touching my eyeballs. Then she would as if hurl herself at me with the point of the deadly weapon directed to my heart, but would stop just as it seemed that my last moment had come. This went on for a little while; but short though it was it seemed endless. I felt a cold chill, a strange numbness, growing over me; my heart seemed to get cold and weak—colder, and colder—weaker and weaker, still, till at length my eyes closed. I tried to open them—succeeded; tried again—failed, succeeded—failed—and at length consciousness passed away from me.

The last thing I remember seeing with my waking eyes was the gleam of the long knife in the starlight as it moved in the young girl’s dexterous play. The last sound I heard was a low laugh from all three of the children.

* * * * *

The voice in my ears was dim and distant; but it gradually grew louder, and the spoken words became intelligible:

“Wake up!—Wake up, man! You will get your death of cold!”

Cold! The word struck home, for there was at my heart a numbness, and a chill as of death. My consciousness struggled back into existence, and I opened my eyes.

It was now much brighter, for a great yellow moon had arisen, and the common was flooded with its light. Beside me were two persons whom at once I recognised as “the honeymoon couple” of earlier in the day. The man was bending over me, and was shaking me roughly by the shoulder, whilst the lady stood by, looking on anxiously, with her hands clasped.

“He is not dead, George, is he?” I heard her say. The answer came.

“No! thank goodness!—He must have fallen asleep. It is a mercy that you had the inspiration to come out to see the moonlight view from here; he might have died of cold. See! the ground is white with the hoar-frost already. Wake up, man!—Wake up, and come away!”

“My heart,” I murmured, “My heart!” for it was icy cold. The man looked more serious, and said to his wife:

“Bella, this may be serious. Could you run back to the hotel, and send some one if necessary? It may be that his heart is affected.”

“Certainly, dear; shall I go at once?”

“Wait a minute first.” He leant over me again. The past was coming back to me quickly, and I asked him:

“Did you see anywhere, some children, two Indian girls, and a fair haired boy?”

“Yes! hours and hours ago, as they went down the London road on a tricycle. They were laughing, and we thought them the prettiest and happiest children we had ever seen. But why?”

“My heart! my heart!” I cried out again, for there was a coldness which seemed to numb me.

The man put his hand over my heart, but quickly tore it away again with a cry of terror.

“What is it, George? what is it?” almost shrieked the lady, for his action was so sudden and unexpected, that it thoroughly frightened her.

He stood back, and she clung frightened to his arm, as a large blindworm wriggled itself out from my bosom—fell on the ground—and glided away down the hill side into the copse below.

Transcription notes: corrected ‘Studiorum’ from ‘Studiorium’ and regularised spelling of Haslemere.

This text is in the public domain.

My First Marathon

Tue, 28 May 2024 14:20:44 +0100

I’ve now been running for 3½ years, having completed the Couch to 5K programme with my son in January 2021. I’m lucky enough to live on the South Downs in England, so I have a wealth of interesting off-road opportunities to ensure I never get bored. I’ve also found many friends to run with and, at some point, the conversation always turns to distance running, and the marathon in particular.

I have set myself a target of running 40 km a week, which is generally completed over 3 or 4 runs. I tend to enjoy trail runs of about 8 km to 15 km, though I’ve now found that I can just leave the house and run a half marathon (21.1 km) if I feel like it. Until yesterday, however, I had never run a marathon (42.2 km.)

I’ve never particularly fancied the idea of a marathon, having had in mind that it would take a specific training programme and careful eating to get ready for it. But I still couldn’t shake the idea that I should run one, just for the experience.

The weather was predicted to be unpleasant yesterday. If I got up at 5 a.m., there was a reasonable chance that I could run for an hour before getting wet so, when the birds woke me at 4.30 a.m., I put on my shoes and headed out to the National Trust land at Blackcap, just north-west of Lewes. This is a 200 m ridge that offers panoramic views of the Low Weald northwards, as well as overlooking Lewes and Brighton, sat in its bowl to the south.

The Low Weald, looking north from Blackcap

Blackcap itself is surmounted by a triangulation pillar alongside a small copse with a stone and plaque noting that it was replanted in 1953 to commemorate the coronation of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

Sunrise serenity at Blackcap

From there, I made my way to the beacon on Mount Harry and then followed tracks roughly south-east, keeping the woodland to my left and then coming up north-east until I came to the chalk pits at Offham. I have driven through here many times, but I’d never had a view from up behind the pits. Standing behind Offham Chalk Pit and the Fairy Ring, the land just drops away about 60 m to the road below, the faces having been loosened with gunpowder before picks completed the job.

Offham Chalk Pit, looking roughly ESE over the Ouse to St. Peter's at Hamsey

A thin line between the Chalk Pit and the Fairy Ring

From here I headed SSE down Landport Bottom to join Nevill Road. Almost exactly 760 years ago, the armies of Henry III and Simon de Montfort had clashed here, at the Battle of Lewes.

The next section took me along the Brighton Road south, where I crossed the railway and A27 by turning left alongside Hamsey Riding School. It was still only 6.15 a.m. as I met the horses in the field below Jugg’s Road and looked up to see the sky was much blacker here. I sheltered on the path for about 10 minutes while the darkest of the clouds dumped some rain and whooshed past.

As I came out to Ashcombe Windmill, below Kingston Ridge, I took a closer look at the sky. It was clear that more rain was coming, but the band that had just passed over me was not being followed; instead, the next darker clouds heading eastwards were going to pass north of me and probably dump over at Blackcap. Oh frabjous day!

I saw lambs at Ashcombe Windmill, so I sat down to entice them over

As I mounted Kingston Ridge, I looked south towards the sea and it was evident that the cliffs were now bathed in sunshine. My legs felt good, and I had been running at an easy pace, with the photo stops and saying hello to horses, so I turned on the Ridge and started heading towards Rodmell. The trail slopes slightly downwards along field boundaries until you come out at the top of Mill Hill at Rodmell. From there, a slight scramble down towards South Farm, where they have pumpkins later in the year, and then a gentle ascent into Telscombe village. I always end up walking parts of Gorham’s Lane as I come out of the village, so I found myself crossing Telscombe Tye at about 7.30 a.m. There was cloud cover overhead, but all very bright and high.

At Saltdean I dropped down onto the Undercliff. I was feeling quite weary by this point, so I stopped at Molly’s for a cup of tea and a Mars bar. I jogged along along towards the Marina, fully intending to head up Sheepcote Valley to home, but then it dawned on me that that would leave me just short of a full marathon distance. Now, that would be a shame, wouldn’t it? So I trotted out along the sea wall at the Marina and headed right on the Undercliff, back towards Rottingdean. From there, it was a more gentle ascent to Beacon Hill and back through Ovingdean to home.

In total, I had been out for 5¼ hours, moving for an hour less than that time (um, that cup of tea took a while!) and climbing 645 m in the process. I could barely believe that the only decisions involved in running a marathon were ‘am I feeling ok so far?’ and ‘how do I avoid the next wave of clouds?’

I soaked in a bath with Epson salts when I got in and my legs felt fine even the next day. The strangest effect I had from it was that my forearms were intensely achey a couple of days afterwards. As I hadn’t run on them, I assume it was a dehydration effect, but I couldn’t explain it.

And that’s how I ended up running an accidental marathon!

Wish It Was Windy

Tue, 28 May 2024 09:47:00 +0100

I believe that water is for sailing on; not drinking.¹ If the water in question is the Solent, it’s not even for swimming in. I should know, I’ve tried it on a busy Saturday afternoon.

Our party that year was split across two yachts, and we decided to go for a race in the Solent. We agreed the route around some buoys north of Cowes and set sail on a sunny Saturday. Slowly. Really slowly. I was helming one of the yachts and, looking over the stern, I was convinced the wake was heading towards the front of the boat. I casually mentioned to the crew that we were going slowly enough for me to swim from the back to the front of the boat.

I was soon to wish that there had been enough wind to carry my words away. Dave took a quick look over the side and bet me I’d never make it.

Before you could say “jellyfish ahoy,” I’d stripped to my smalls and slipped over the side. Did I say slipped? I meant dive-bombed. By the time I’d surfaced, everyone on the yacht thought I’d spotted some pearls on the bottom. The yacht was five metres from me and my frantically inelegant front crawl couldn’t do anything to narrow the gap.

The yacht sailed on. Someone yelled that they’d circle back for me, but meanwhile I was just a small head bobbing in the busiest shipping lane in southern England. I could hear a humming sound … a menacing humming. As the large motorboat zoomed towards me, I found myself hoping that the pilot had been drinking enough to believe that there was a small crowd of us in the water.

Fortunately, they saw me soon enough to slow down. What’s more, they’d seen that my yacht was already circling back for me, so when the skipper asked if I needed any assistance, I decided that the least embarrassing way out was to pretend that the entire episode had been a planned ‘man overboard’ drill. Hoping that my face wouldn’t give the game away, I sent him on his way with the line “Thanks, but they’ve got to learn some time!”

I originally wrote this in 1998. My attitude to drinking water has improved since then! ↩︎

The Appearance of Seaworthiness

Sat, 20 Apr 2024 13:45:17 +0100

Years ago, I used to deliver yachts during the summer holidays. It was a great way to get a cheap holiday and explore a new place every night. We would sail the yacht Sea Tramp from its home on the Hamble to wherever most people wanted to charter it from over the summer, which could be Cornwall, the Channel Islands or Brittany, for example.

Sea Tramp was a 50′ ketch made of 25 tonnes of ferro-concrete. “A concrete boat?” people exclaim, but concrete is pretty impervious to corrosion. The owner had intended to take it around the world on his retirement but, until then, he would tweak the equipment every year. We would get on board to find that the anchor had been replaced, with chain of a pitch that didn’t quite fit the winch, so it would slip, or a new hole had been punched in the superstructure to allow cabling for the latest gadget.

Our aim this time was to deliver the yacht to its summer berth at Falmouth. We set out from the Solent, rounded Portland Bill and were looking to cross Lyme Bay, some 90-odd nautical miles, overnight.

During the night passage, we were occupied with fixing an engine problem when we discovered that the bilges of the boat were damper than they should be. A split water tank (repurposed from the owner’s farm) had dumped its entire contents. Turning back would involve facing the turbulent waters of Portland Race again, so the skipper decided we would carry on towards Brixham.

We reached Brixham at 3 a.m. and anchored off, because threading our way amongst tiny plastic boats in a waterlogged concrete battering ram with the aid of torches and bleary eyes didn’t seem like a smart move.

The next morning, we had a lot of work to do. We had to scout out the harbour to see where we could moor in order to pick up some water. We inflated both dinghies, fitted them with outboards, and Jim and I started making trips into the harbour.

We had both arrived back on board and were grabbing a coffee when we saw a large orange semi-rigid inflatable approaching at speed from outside the harbour. As it came alongside we could see it contained four men and a dog. Two men and the dog jumped on board and introduced themselves as Customs & Excise officers. We answered their questions about our movements and they seemed satisfied and ready to leave when the officer in charge asked if they could run their dog around below, as he’d not been off the boat all morning. All morning? It was only 9.30!

Nevertheless, the only correct answer to this is “Yes,” as a “no” leads to them taking your boat alongside the quay and dumping its contents on the quayside, if they wish.

As the dog had a happy, waggy-tail, sniff and rummage, we enquired of the officer why they were interested. It turns out that anchoring off a port in the middle of the night and making runs ashore in fast outboards at first light is exactly the behaviour of drug smugglers, and our large ketch made, in his words, “a good sea-going boat.”

The customs men were left quite perplexed as, at the mention of seaworthiness, we all recalled the spluttering engine and panicked bailing of the previous night and collapsed with laughter.

Z80 Quality Indicators

Tue, 30 Jan 2024 21:03:24 +0000

I’m 78% through my annotated disassembly of Tehkan’s arcade game Star Force and I was just wondering what quality indicators other people use to rate Z80 code that they read? What makes you nod in satisfaction, or sneer in disapproval?

Positive quality indicators I can see in this code:

Excellent use of IX and IY to index structures, which makes it really easy to comment, by adding equates for structure offsets.
Self-initialising structures, where the assumption is that they’ll receive a pointer to a block of zeroed memory, and the code uses the first byte as a flag as to whether it is initialised yet. This brings initialisation and usage code right together in the listing, again easing understanding of code that manipulates maps, enemy waves and sprite structures.
Great use of jump tables, which enables a lot of common code to be used, while adding hooks for exceptions.
Nice use of flags for interrupt service routines, to limit the amount of data transfers that needs to be done every frame (OK, this one is specific to game programming.)

Negative quality indicators I can see:

cp 0 instead of or a
BCD arithmetic in some places, but hacky workarounds in others: why would you do this when daa is 4 T-states?
Multiple ldirs with address shuffling (and a bug when they lost count), when lddr should have been used.
mask and shift, instead of shift and mask (which would’ve enabled single byte 8080-compatible rotates instead of Z80 extensions)

All of this is reminding me why I loved Z80 coding, 40 years ago!

A Map Reading Session

Wed, 15 Nov 2023 21:32:52 +0000

I had offered to teach an evening of map reading with the local training ship of the Nautical Training Corps. This had come about after leading them on an evening walk from Woodingdean to Rottingdean windmill during the summer, with them carrying maps, and me explaining what we were seeing along the way, such as a local trig point and tumuli and the windmill itself, on Beacon Hill.

The cadets range from 8 to 15 years old, so I was aware that some children might not have looked at map before, but there would also be some who could identify features such as contour lines. We split into two groups, with the juniors (8 to 11 years old) first, and then the seniors.

I started off with an A3 map of the counties (“administrative boundaries”) of Great Britain, printed off from the Ordnance Survey website. I was curious to see how many cadets could tell me where Brighton was. If we rule out the comedy guesses around Inverness and Aberdeen, there were still a range of dots from Kent to Dorset. I was relieved to see that all but one of the seniors placed dots on the south coast at least.

Answers to the question: ‘Where is Brighton?’

I then got out the Explorer map and we took a look at the features. I had downloaded the flash cards from the OS website and laminated them, so we went through a few of them and, for comedy value, looked at the multiple cycling features, which I glossed as bike hire, cycle route, mountain bike trail and broken bike (craft centre). Nobody knew what the craft centre symbol was supposed to be. When I showed them a photo of an old woman with a spinning wheel, two of the 20 cadets managed to identify it, which surprised me, given that no one has used one for nearly 200 years.

I showed them how to produce a grid reference for a place to the nearest hundred metres, using the 1km map squares and some Romers on tracing paper that I’d hastily printed, and then the cadets were split into groups of 2 or 3, with their own map, and they attempted to answer questions about points on the map that I’d identified with grid references.

All of the cadets were managing to find the locations on the map and enjoyed using the legend on the map to identify other features as they came across them. Each of the sessions lasted about 40 minutes.

I was pleased how this session worked. Although I had lots of ideas and prepared facts, it was useful to restrict the session to small chunks of discovery, discussion, new skill and practice. I had spent a lot of time exploring the map myself, before deciding on the quiz questions and that paid off too, as I could answer a lot of questions about discovered features on the fly.

External USB Drive

Mon, 06 Nov 2023 16:05:36 +0000

I’ve been using rsync to maintain a copy of a website on an external hard drive, which I bought and just started as is, but there are a few problems that I’ve been looking to correct.

Firstly, external USB drives come pre-formatted for Windows, with an NTFS filesystem. This works just fine on Linux, with the drive being mounted with the ntfs3 driver. The nice things about this is that I could, if required, just plug it into a Windows machine and copy files straight off.

However, the website that I’m copying has a few files and directories with names that conflict with NTFS naming rules. At one point in the hierarchy, there is a directory called AUX, and there are also several files with illegal punctuation in their names. So far, I’ve come across ‘*’ (asterisk) and ‘:’ (colon).

To my surprise, rsync doesn’t appear to offer any way of ensuring that names are representable in the target filesystem, which means that I get a cryptic error number (22, I think), and I simply have to leave that file or directory out of the copy.

So, I resolved to format another external hard drive with a Linux filesystem and use that for my mirroring. I was slightly concerned that using drives through a USB interface might complicate low-level operations like formatting, and leave me with a dead drive, but I was pleasantly surprised.

I bought a WD Elements 4TB drive. The box claims compatibility with Windows and MAC OS too, if you reformat it. Linux is not mentioned, even though it works out of the box. I bought WD just to test another make; all my other external drives are by Seagate.

I plugged it into the USB port, mounted and unmounted it, just to see that it was visible.

I then fired up GParted, the GNOME Partition Editor and, sure enough, it reports that /dev/sdb1 has a single NTFS partition. I selected that partition and reformatted to ext4, changed the volume label to “mirror” and unticked the “msftdata” flag.

When those changes were committed, I remounted the drive, created a top-level directory which I chown’d to my user, and I’m all ready to go.

Book Trading Cards

Sat, 25 Feb 2023 17:31:48 +0000

With World Book Day nearly upon us, I was pondering ways in which children could be engaged with reading books.

I know how children enjoy trading cards like Pokémon, so could we encourage them along more wholesome lines, that don’t involve rarity and competition, and facilitate a discussion about what books they’ve enjoyed?

I’ve mocked up the front side of some trading cards:

I have yet to produce a design for the back, but I think the contents would include:

Title and series of the book,
Author,
Genre,
A small synopsis or teaser, and
Five open stars at the bottom, which the children could fill in with a marker pen.

The covers themselves are normally so attractive that the front doesn’t need any extra adornment, apart from an appropriately-coloured border.

Producing the cards 🔗

In case anyone fancies having a go at making some, here are some notes on what I did.

I gathered the book cover images from Amazon. To my surprise, Amazon make this very easy. When you pick a particular book, beneath the cover image, which is often a link to their “Look inside” page, the cover image is directly available with a “See this image” link, and the image is large enough that it can be used to make a quality print on an inkjet at trading card size.

A standard trading card is 64mm x 89mm (2½" × 3½"). Because the proportions of the book cover won’t necessarily be the same as those of a trading card, they need a border. My first experiments used a rather arbitrarily-chosen dark blue, but it was clear that it was a really poor match for most books.

So, I’ve used GraphicsMagick to find a reasonable match from the colours used for each cover. There are often three or four colours which would work for the border, so I’ve picked one by experimenting with the histogram produced by GM’s “segment” function:

gm convert book-cover.jpg -segment 1.0x1.5 -verbose tmp.png

This will cluster colours in the image and tell you what the colours are with an RGB triple in hexadecimal, and a measure of how many pixels were in each cluster. The segment parameters here work for a lot of books, but occasionally I’ve had to reduce them to tiny numbers when the images are more photographic, at which point you might find it easier to pull the cover into a paint program and use a pipette tool to pick a colour you like.

As far as I know, you can’t direct “gm convert” to simply not produce an image as output, and if you direct the output to stdout and pipe that into /dev/null, you’ll lose the histogram.

I used GraphicsMagick to composite nine trading cards on an image sized for A4 paper at 300 dpi (i.e. 2480 × 3508 pixels.) There is at least a 5 mm border all round and roughly 2 mm between each one, which is plenty for someone with scissors and a steady hand.

I’ve printed my cards on 170 g/m² matte photo paper and then laminated them with a glossy sleeve.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

DEC Manual Covers

Sat, 11 Feb 2023 23:20:58 +0000

In the late 1970s, Digital Equipment Corporation produced a set of manuals for their terminal and printer equipment that I think are unmistakably of their decade, with simple line designs in browns and oranges. I’ve always loved the simplicity of these designs, so during the first pandemic lockdown, I decided to spend some time with Inkscape, recreating the covers, without the scratches, fading and curling edges that my physical manuals had accumulated over the past 40 years.

I’ve come across six different designs so far, and drawn five of them. The four that are most alike are now on my office wall as a montage, which you are welcome to print yourself:

The covers used for this design are cropped from these full ones:

During the next decade, the covers either had no pictures on them at all, or had simple line drawings, which is really disappointing!

Manx da capo

Tue, 27 Dec 2022 13:40:04 +0000

Over lockdown, I was revisiting some old projects and taking the opportunity to see if they would benefit from a fresh pair of eyes and new learning over the last decade.

Manx was one such; a catalogue of old computer manuals that I created 20 years ago and worked on until 2009, at which point some major changes in my life meant I could no longer sustain the effort to maintain what had always been a single person task. Although I’d had plans to allow multiple editors to add content, the tooling was always the least exciting part of the project and only two of us had ever maintained it.

The Perl source for the application and the database had been dumped and distributed, and I mostly forgot about it. It was rewritten in PHP by someone else and placed online.

Over a decade on and, I had started work on a new, large art-history database (a catalogue raisonné for the artist A. C. Michael) and had learned a lot about improved database queries, application structure, testing and templating of web applications as well as, crucially, backend tooling. So I took a look at upgrading Manx, to satisfy my own curiosity.

This is still a work in progress and I’ll be writing more about this over the coming months. The significant changes so far, not all user-visible, are:

Citations have been added, so that publications mentioned by related documents or catalogues are explicitly marked. This should answer questions about why a given document is in the catalogue at all.
Some documents incorporate others. For example, print sets are frequently assemblies of lower level parts. These are now explicit in the database.
Pages are generated using a template engine. Apart from the benefit of separating functionality from presentation, the discipline of retrieving all the relevant information from the database before “pouring” it into a template for display allows the information to also be made available in other forms. I can now use the same backend for powering the command line tools I use for updating the database by sending JSON extracts as well as HTML.
The back-end spidering software now provides a much faster way of updating websites that contain scanned documents.
Different versions of documents can now be grouped in the database to provide a clearer view of supersessions.
The number of documents in the database has climbed by 13000 to over 35000, with another 7000 references to online scans.

I have spoken to the person who took on the job of maintenance of the database many years ago. I haven’t yet worked out how we can collaborate with the new features but it is not completely off my radar.

Hugo Codeberg Logo

Thu, 22 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Notes on adding the Codeberg link to my site, built with Hugo.

The Ananke theme doesn’t (yet) include Codeberg, so I downloaded the black and white Codeberg logo and placed this in themes/ananke/assets/ananke/socials/codeberg.svg.

There are two apparent problems with this logo though:

Default logo is whiter than other social icons
Link says “Codeberg logo” on hover

I can fix (2) by removing <title> element from svg. But this doesn’t fix (1).

Googling “codeberg logo for font awesome” leads me to Codeberg Design issue 13 where “mray” (Robert Martinez) has produced a solely black and white version. Copied this to same place and removed <title> element again.

https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Design says that “Codeberg blue” is #2185d0, so I tried this as the hover colour but decided that it didn’t really fit, so I ended up using white.

The configuration file YAML ends up as:

params:
  ananke_socials:
  - name: codeberg
    url: https:/codeberg.org/hisdeedsaredust
    label: Codeberg
    color: "#ffffff"

VT52 Special Graphics

Mon, 25 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I was upgrading the images of the VT100 Special Graphics character set used in my online transcripts of the manuals today and I wondered about the VT52 equivalents, which are not shown graphically in any of the manuals that I could find; only the descriptions exist.

However, Fritz Mueller dumped the VT52 character generator ROM some years ago, so I thought I’d take a quick look.

In short, the VT52 Special Graphics look like this:

This is a lazy interpretation of the ROM, using a very similar script to that which I use to process the VT100 glyphs, so I haven’t included the extra scan lines that appear between text lines on the VT52, which is either 2 or 3, depending on whether you’re running at 60 Hz or 50 Hz, respectively. I also haven’t checked the aspect ratio of the characters; the Maintenance Manual provides dimensions for the complete raster which I could use.

Two things strike me as odd about this picture:

The second glyph is marked as “reserved” in all the manuals I’ve seen, so I have no idea what “cd” is supposed to represent, and whether the same glyph is present in all models of the VT52, and
The VT52 Maintenance Manual claims that only 7 scanlines are retrieved from the character generator ROM, which is clearly incorrect, as there is a glyph containing a horizontal line for each of the 8 scanlines that appear on the display.

OA&F: Dating books by address

Sun, 08 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I would like to determine exactly when the books with floral covers were produced by the Edinburgh publishers Oliphant, Anderson & Ferrier between about 1880 and 1900.

I’m finding that there are very few dates on title pages or the reverse of the title and no printer’s codes at the back. Many of these books were already old at the time of their first printing with floral covers and had many editions in later years, so I need to find another way of dating them.

Luckily, there are many other clues in the books themselves. For a start, the name of the publisher changed over time. Every single one of these books has the name “Oliphant, Anderson & Ferrier” on the title page, and we know that the firm adopted that name after September 1880, when the Elgin bookseller John Scott Ferrier joined the firm. Until the end of that year, title pages appended “late W. Oliphant & Co.” to mark the connection with the previous identity.

In front of me I have this book:

Here we can see another hint: the address of the publisher is given as Edinburgh and 24 Old Bailey, London. As noted above, the book itself is no help; it had been first published in Toronto, Canada in 1870 by James Campbell and Son, and the exact same book plates were used by William Oliphant for the first British edition in 1871.

So I had a dig through the British Newspaper Archive to find out when OA&F had a presence in London. Searching by addresses often works surprisingly well on the BNA, and I soon had a wealth of business names to work with. I could also correlate these with OA&F adverts appearing in the papers, so I could see over what period they were using that address.

At first, I couldn’t tell how big the building at 24 Old Bailey might be, and I assumed that there could be a shop-front as well as offices above. I thought it was unlikely that a bookshop itself would be run by OA&F, but perhaps they had gone into partnership with a company who worked in the offices above.

The earliest OA&F advert that I could find with the Old Bailey address was from February 1889. Looking at other occurrences of that address around this time, the name Alfred Boot & Son kept coming up, and they were a firm of printers.

Drilling backwards, Alfred Boot had certainly been there from the 1870s, until he was adjudged bankrupt in 1880. Boot himself died in 1884 and the shop had passed to a furniture business called Hankins & Co., but it is possible that Boot’s family had retained an interest in the building, because in 1887 we find Alfred Boot & Sons on the premises, and then scattered mentions of the same business (with another partner called Carpenter, at times) until 1901, when the leasehold went elsewhere.

This looks promising. If Boot’s was a printer and distributor, they’d be ideal partners for the Edinburgh firm. I was looking for confirmation in any publishing news when I came across two bits of counter evidence for the partnership. One, that OA&F adverts started showing a new address in the City of 21 Paternoster Square, from May 1896, and two, that 24 Old Bailey had been completely gutted by fire in 1893.

At 10pm on Wednesday 15 November 1893, a fire had broken out and run rampant through the Old Bailey, Farringdon Street and Fleet Lane. The Morning Post’s report on 17 November names Alfred Boot and Sons among the occupants of the six storey building at 24 Old Bailey and reported that they had been nearly burnt out. This report also named many other printers and publishers in that area, including Marlborough and Co., Blackie and Sons and the giant Cassell. Boot and Sons made plans to move out to Paternoster Row.

So, we have Boot and Son moving out to Paternoster Row, but OA&F didn’t shift their address to Paternoster Square until 1896. So their partner in that building wasn’t Boot and Son.

The mystery was solved by a small announcement in the Morning Post again, on 6 April 1896:

Mr J. F. Spriggs, of 23, Old Bailey, has removed his publishing and advertising agency to larger premises at 21, Paternoster-square.

Having got to the name “Spriggs,” the rest of the confirmation came quickly enough.

James Fletcher Spriggs was born in America in 1844 but became a naturalised British subject. He had been employed by the publishers Hodder and Stoughton in the 1870s before striking out on his own. The Airdrie & Coatbridge Advertiser on 22 December 1888 announces the commencement of his partnership with OA&F:

Messrs. Oliphant, Anderson & Ferrier, of Edinburgh, whose business has developed a good deal of late years, intend to open a London branch at the Old Bailey. Mr. J. F. Spriggs will be their London representative.

This ties in beautifully with OA&F’s first advert mentioning the Old Bailey, in February 1889.

This business relationship was cemented with a personal one in April 1891 when Spriggs married Mary Tait Anderson, the daughter of Robert Anderson, the Anderson of Oliphant, Anderson & Ferrier.

Spriggs died in 1906, with The Scotsman having, in their Wills section, this:

Mr James Fletcher Spriggs, of Paternoster Square, London, representative in London of Messrs. Oliphant, Anderson, & Ferrier, of Edinburgh, publishers, and of the Fleming H. Revell Company of New York and Chicago … … £5734.

So, a very productive evening’s work not only leads to the conclusion that books with the Old Bailey address would have been produced between the start of 1889 and mid 1896, but exactly why the address was in use.

Postscript 🔗

I had to stop myself going off in a completely different direction when I encountered the notice of a post-fire auction of printer’s equipment. I do want to know more about the technology used for these covers but we’ve already established that Alfred Boot was not the printers in use by OA&F. Nevertheless, I couldn’t resist this, from the London Evening Standard of 27 December 1893 (I have squished the Over-Capitalisation and EMPHASIS in the original):

Sale By Auction No. 24, Old Bailey.—Salvage from the recent fire, slightly damaged by water. Messrs. James Lewis and Co. will sell by auction, on the premises of Messrs. Boot and Son, and Carpenter, as above, on Wednesday, Jan. 3, 1894, at twelve, the printers’ plant and machinery, including double demy litho machine by Newsome¹, Wood, and Co., quad crown perfecting machine by Hopkinson and Cope, four Wharfdale machines, two croppers, hydraulic press, cutting machine, 20 tons of type, wood letter, furniture, &c., fixtures, fittings, &c., seven tons litho stones, and a quantity of effects appertaining to the trade.

Twenty tons of type!

Newsome is a typo. for George Newsum (1838‒1930), a printing-machine maker from Leeds. ↩︎

A new project: Oliphant, Anderson & Ferrier

Sat, 07 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been acquiring books that were produced by the Edinburgh publishers Oliphant, Anderson & Ferrier between about 1880 and 1900. Specifically, I’ve been looking at their floral covers, because something very interesting seems to have happened around about 1890.

Until that decade, books with cloth covers were fairly plain. The cloth itself was normally blocked (stamped) in black or gold and the only colour in evidence, other than the cloth itself, might be a picture, printed on paper and pasted to the cover.

Then some change in technology occurred, and full colour printing on the cloth became possible. How did Oliphant, Anderson & Ferrier respond to this change? Well, they produced a set of floral book covers because, I assume, how could you more obviously show off a wide range of colours than by drawing from nature?

Some of these floral designs had previously been used on monochrome covers, simple outline drawings blocked in black. Many of the designs were seen for the first time in full colour.

I have decided to investigate several aspects of this colour revolution. I’d love to know exactly how these covers were produced, i.e. are they painted wood blocks, copper plates, lithography? I’d like to know who designed them, and how many designs there were, too. If I can pin down exactly when they were first produced, I may even be able to discern which equipment was being used, so a look at patents and catalogues of printing equipment is on the cards.

Victorian book covers are not something I’ve ever looked at before, nor had I heard of Oliphant, Anderson & Ferrier before happening across these books, so along the way I will be investigating the history of the company, their relationships to other firms at the time (because they certainly weren’t the only ones producing floral covers), and the printing and binding technology of the preceding decades.

Many of the books I am acquiring have covers that are faded and rubbed, which is not surprising given their age, so the single tie-in that this has to my other computing interests is that I will be re-drawing the covers with Inkscape in order to restore them to perhaps how they looked when fresh off the presses, 130 years ago.

Colour separations with GraphicsMagick

Fri, 10 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I have an old manual that I’d like to convert to PDF. Most of the documents I scan are just black and white. However, this one has a lot of pictures with blue highlights, and table backgrounds in the same blue and I’d like to preserve that limited use of colour without keeping every page in full colour. It strikes me that I should be able to do that by separating layers for each colour used, and overlaying them to make a neat PDF.

To do this, I’m going to experiment with GraphicsMagick to produce the colour separations and the Perl module PDF::Builder to make the final PDF. Eric Smith’s tumble can also be used to construct a PDF with overlays.

Assessing the pages 🔗

Firstly, let’s take a look at the pages of the manual in question. It has 142 pages, but there appear to be just a few different page types that we may have to treat differently.

Here are the different page types I can see:

The first one is a section heading. This one will be dealt with differently than the others, because I’ll just produce a black image by straightforward thresholding, and make the background blue using PDF::Builder.

The second page, an image with blue highlights, is the most important case, because the image wouldn’t make sense without colour.

The third image is a text page with a blue background to the table. It wouldn’t be the worst crime in the world to simply threshold this page, dropping the background colour, but we are aiming to handle this too, as it provides the real test for whether the final composited page will be legible. An alternative approach to this kind of page, seen in many scanned manuals, is to process this to a black and white image treating it as greyscale and dithering the table background to make a 1-bit-per-pixel TIFF image. However, this is much worse for legibility and compression than simply dropping the colour altogether.

(Incidentally, if you think that the blue of the first image is slightly different from the others, you’d be right. Our treatment of the images will take care of subtle differences.)

Scanning the original document 🔗

I’ve scanned the original document in 24-bit colour at 600 dpi and saved the pages as single lossless TIFF files. The only other options for colour scanning on my Epson WorkForce-series are to save to PDF, giving me no control over the output, or JPEG, which is a lossy format. My suspicion is that PDF output will actually embed a JPEG.

The resultant image files are huge. I haven’t investigated what support the TIFF format has for compressing colour files, but the scanner certainly doesn’t attempt any compression, giving me files that are nearly 100 MiB per page! The entire 142-page manual takes up 13 GiB on disk: I’m hoping to produce a PDF that is a thousandth of this size.

My scanner has additional options for the type of item being scanned: “text,” “text and images,” or “photos.” There doesn’t seem to be any information available on what the scanner does differently for each option. It is apparent that the scanner does a quick first pass for photographic items, probably adjusting colour balance, which it doesn’t do for the other two. From examination of scans, colours are somewhat more smudged on the first two settings; this works in our favour, so I always pick “text and images” mode.

How would colour separations work? 🔗

My standard technique for preserving a black and white document is to save every page in TIFF Group 4 format, one of the fax standard compression methods. This is lossless and produces very good results for text. So, my starting point was thinking that all the separations I produced for each page; black and blue in this case, would be all compressed the same way, and “masked” onto the page, so that the “off” pixels of each layer would become transparent, and the “on” pixels would be rendered in the appropriate colour.

However, Group 4 encoding can only handle black and white images, not white and some other colour. An initial reading of the specification says that Group 4 is for “bilevel” images, which I took to mean two colours, but then it becomes clear that only black and white can be represented, and PDF readers won’t apply a foreground colour to them on the page.

Still, never mind. The black layers of each page can use this compression method, and I’ll use PNG images for the other layers, which use Deflate compression. In order to use PDF’s masking feature, to make white pixels render transparently, I have to produce indexed (paletted) PNGs, which GraphicsMagick will quite happily do if you prefix your output filename with PNG8:.

To summarise the image production, then. I’m looking to take each colour TIFF scan and produce two files:

Take the black pixels from each page and produce a Group 4-compressed TIFF
Take the blue pixels from each page and produce an indexed PNG.

Each page of the PDF will be produced by rendering the blue PNG first, followed by the black TIFF, masked to allow blue pixels to show through.

Why am I bothering to produce an indexed PNG for the blue layer, when it will be rendered first, with nothing below to show through? The answer is simply that this is a generic technique that will work for multiple colour separations. This document also contains some small areas of grey highlighting that I could process using another overlay but as it happens I’ll handle them differently.

Black layer 🔗

The general technique for producing each layer is going to be:

Change the colours you don’t want to capture to white.
Change the colour you do want to black.
Threshold.
Change the colour you want back to its original colour.

In this case, the blue pixels are light enough that simply thresholding the page at 50% will cause them to threshold to white, so step 1 is redundant.

Higher threshold percentages cause more pixels to turn black, so your thresholding value will be determined by the quality of the text in your original document. More lightly-printed material will need a higher threshold to thicken up letter stems. Photocopied documentation may also need a higher threshold but with an additional despeckling step. Experimentation is necessary, but at least the same threshold value will apply across the entire source document.

Varying threshold values from 40% to 80% – clearly 80% is too high

For this document, each black layer can be produced like this:

gm convert scan.tiff -threshold 50% -compress Group4 black-layer.tiff

Blue layer 🔗

For the colour layers, we need to drop out as much black (and other colours) as possible, meaning converting them to white, and then we turn our colour to black for thresholding.

To convert all pixels from one colour to another, you use GM’s -opaque option:

gm convert source.tiff -fill green1 -opaque black destination.tiff

This converts all black pixels in the image to a particular shade of green. But this isn’t going to work by itself, as there is some natural variation in colours in the scan: we’d just get this:

We use the -fuzz option to capture colours close to the original colour:

gm convert source.tiff -fuzz 70% -fill green1 -opaque black destination.tiff

You must specify -fuzz and -fill before -opaque, as the operation occurs as soon as -opaque is parsed, using the current values of fuzz and fill. Putting the steps above together, we produce the blue layer like this:

gm convert source.tiff \
    -fuzz 99% -fill white -opaque black \
    -fuzz 10% -fill black -opaque '#b2cdd9' \
    -threshold 20% \
    -fill '#b2cdd9' -opaque black destination.png

Here we see the step-by-step production of the blue layer, starting with the source image on the left (1), ending with the blue overlay (5). The last image (6) shows the blue and black layers composited together as they will appear in the final PDF. So we have moved from a true colour source image, to one in which every pixel is just one of three colours, white, black or blue.

Note that the thresholding step produces an image with just two colours. Saving this image as a PNG will automatically produce a paletted image with just two colours, rather than a 24-bit (true colour) image.

The step that I am missing automation for is choosing the hex value of the colour that I wish to extract. Given that fuzz is a percentage of possible distance in RGB space, picking a value too far from the “mean blue” will result in you either needing to increase fuzz or risk leaving white holes in your coloured image. At the moment, I’ve been picking the colour by choosing an image with a large area of blue, pulling it into Gimp and successively resampling down until I’ve got a tiny image on which I use the colour dropper tool. There may be a way of colour “clustering” in GraphicsMagick that I’m currently missing; I’d love to hear about it.

Final results 🔗

The PDF version of this manual, Installing and Using the LA75 Companion Printer, is just 11 MiB.

Over the next few weeks, I intend to cover more topics along the same lines, showing Perl scripts for driving the GraphicsMagick conversions, adding cropping and deskewing of scans and the production of the PDF with PDF::Builder.

TEI with light markup

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 17:26:26 +0000

After preparing ebooks for years with HTML and getting frustrated with a morass of divs and spans with classes, I’ve decided to experiment with preparing texts in the vocabulary of the Text Encoding Initiative. Conversion to XHTML for web, EPUB and Kindle formats will be taken care of by some scripts, which may be XSLT later, but for now are Perl scripts.

As I’m preparing books from OCRed scans, I’d like to keep my marked-up text as close as possible to the original layout of the printed book, because it helps me spot errors. I’ve recently made two major leaps forward that allow me to work through and correct text a lot faster.

The first one is to keep all of the end of line hyphens intact, not even changing them to indicate “hard” or “soft” hyphens. The TEI to XHTML script takes care of removing or keeping all hyphens by using a spell checker. I’m using the Perl module Text::Hunspell, which can not only use multiple dictionaries (essential when recent works contain words in English, French, German, Latin and Hindi), but also a book-specific dictionary containing proper names and unusual or archaic words.

The second speed-up concerns quotation marks. Most quotation marks are removed from the text entirely, and replaced by one of the TEI elements <q> or <soCalled>. The remaining quote marks are all apostrophes, and they are retained as the ASCII single quote character, because they can be unambiguously changed to the Unicode right single quote U+2019 by the script. Quote marks will be produced for the other elements (doubles and singles, nested as required) by the script.

There’s a lot more work to do, but I’ve put the results of some experiments online so I can test reading through them. So far, I’ve put up two of Charles E. Pearce’s works, A Star of the East and Dragged from the Dark! The sources for those aren’t online yet, but I’ll put them up shortly.

PANOSE in the wild

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 11:56:33 +0100

I am considering working on the PANOSE font matching part of Fontmatrix because I enjoy playing with Fontmatrix, but its idea of how PANOSE’s individual facets¹ are named or work seems to me to be a bit wonky. For instance, it only understands the names for Latin Text facets, and uses them even for Latin Decorative or Pictorial fonts.

The first step (apart from trying to persuade my one-year-old son to go to sleep long enough for me to even turn on the computer), is to take a look at whether improved matching or re-classifying facilities would do any good at all, and for that, I need to take a look at font classifications in the wild.

Turning to my Font Corpus database, I’ve extracted the following bare facts about PANOSE usage, and I’m quite buoyed up by the results.

From the 35420 fonts in the Corpus, I first get rid of fonts that have complete rubbish in the PANOSE field, which means discarding fonts with:

Family Kind of “Any”(0), which means no attempt at all was made at classification. (13863 fonts).
Facet values out of range. This is generally Weight, which for some reason, perhaps tool error, tends to have the values of 114 or 226. (409 fonts).
Family Kind > 5. Family Kind values up here, which would be used for non Latin, aren’t formalised in any document I can find. (12 fonts).
Weight of “Any”(0). Weight is the only facet that is present for all values of Family Kind, so it really ought to be set to something, even if “No Fit”(1) is the only appropriate value. (1540 fonts).

Having cleared out the rubbish, we are left with 19596 fonts, 55% of the total collection. Of these, just over 90% are Latin Text fonts.

For the Latin Text fonts, more complete classification means that more of the individual facets are set to any value other than “Any”(0). Even “No Fit”(1) gives us some information about the limitations of the classification system.

So, how many facets are set to non-zero in our remaining fonts?

Non-zero facets	No. of fonts
3	349
4	1718
5	135
6	1391
7	6712
8	226
9	66
10	8689

Some of these facets are derived from measured values, and some of them are picked by judgement, which may explain the somewhat uneven coverage of classifications. (And who’s going to classify nine of the facets without doing one extra to complete the job?)

I think the end result is that there are enough fonts with decent classification in the wild to make this something worth working on. Go to sleep, baby boy!

I call the individual numbers of a PANOSE number “facets” to help me from over-using the word “value”. ↩︎

Working around Kindlegen quirks with document transformations

Wed, 13 Jun 2012 21:41:06 +0100

While working on the Kindle (Mobi) version of Antigua and the Antiguans, I found that I was spending too much time attempting to carefully craft some XHTML markup and a stylesheet that would get the final book to look the way I expected it to. Because the Mobi format is only HTML 3.2 with a few extra elements, and no stylesheet support at all, Kindlegen has to do a lot of wizardry to down-convert any EPUB (XHTML + CSS) you are starting with, and the results don’t appear to be consistent across an entire book.

It was while attempting to mark up the genealogical information in the appendices of the book that Kindlegen really came unstuck, and I had to change tack completely. My markup in the EPUB looked like this:

<p class="offspring">Thomas Howard, 2nd Duke of Norfolk...</p>
<p class="offspring">Elizabeth, m. Thomas Boleyne, Viscount...</p>
<div class="generation">
  <p class="offspring">1. George Boleyne, Viscount Rochford,....</p>
  <p class="offspring">2. Anne, youngest ... left issue,</p>
  <div class="generation">
    <p class="offspring">Elizabeth, Queen of England</p>
  </div>
  <p class="offspring">3. Mary, eldest dau. of Thomas,...</p>
</div>

This struck me as sensible, semantic markup, with each successive generation being further indented, as in the original print book. I wished it to look as below, but Kindlegen resolutely refused to play ball:

It struck me that I could assign an individual indent to each of the paragraphs, and get the hanging indent to work with an appropriate number of non-breaking spaces at beginning of each paragraph, but why should I compromise the clean markup, or maintain separate source documents for EPUB and Mobi?

The strategy 🔗

The way I’ve decided to approach this is to write a script that will take my chosen markup vocabulary (XHTML elements with classes of my choosing) and transform it into Mobi’s HTML 3.2 + the few mbp-namespace elements, such that the resulting document passes through Kindlegen without any further changes taking place.

Pros 🔗

I still use Amazon’s chosen packaging program. (This is a big one, as Amazon seem to have recently rejected some books built with Calibre.)
The transformations performed by the script can handle things that Kindlegen won’t even touch, such as small caps support.
Predictability of output, without having to put odd workarounds for Kindlegen failings in the source document. (Want a top margin and a left margin without putting a <div> inside a <div>? Easy.)

Cons 🔗

This approach won’t work for KF8 documents with new features. That doesn’t matter for me, as I’m producing text-heavy books, but anyone wanting to take advantage of KF8 features would have to run Kindlegen on their KF8 source, and then insert the output from a script like mine in place of the mangled Mobi that Kindlegen had produced. (In effect, you’d need the hypothetical mobipack.py to match the existing mobiunpack.py, or try Peter Hatch’s ingenious hack
This is definitely in the “some assembly required” category. It works for my vocabulary for my documents. The transformations from the input vocabulary to the mobi output may vary somewhat depending on the book, but I expect the vocabulary to remain consistent over a long period.
I have to perform any transformations that Kindlegen would normally handle well, such as centring elements.

OK, what do I actually do? 🔗

Enough of the theory. What transformations do I perform on documents? Here is a selection of recipes that you may want to try. I’ll use the CSS element.class notation.

Remove any existing <link rel="stylesheet" ... /> elements. We don’t want Kindlegen to have any CSS information to allow it to further affect our document.
Delete all comments as they are pointless and have provoked Kindlegen bugs.
Process all children of span.sc to make a small caps effect, by inserting <font size="-2"> around lowercase characters.
Move all caption elements into centred paragraphs, immediately before their table.
Kindlegen doesn’t handle p elements inside blockquote, so just remove the blockquote and indent all paragraphs appropriately.
Convert ZWSP characters to ZWNJ to support line wrapping at em dashes without unduly spacing them out.
Insert page breaks before div.chapter
Produce nicely-indented lines of poetry.

Implementation 🔗

My understanding of XSLT is not good enough to implement all of my recipes in the fashion that I think would be neatest, so I use a Perl script and the XML::LibXML module. It lets me use XPath expressions to quickly select nodes of interest, and then add and replace nodes at will.

News from 1796: Brighton's Director of Tourism still up for grabs

Wed, 02 May 2012 13:05:10 +0100

While hunting for reading matter on the history of Brighton, I came across Anthony Pasquin’s New Brighton Guide. As well as being a very funny satirical poem, he also gives us this prose portrait of Brighton in a footnote:

Brighthelmstone, or Brighton, in Sussex, is 54 miles from London.—It was, like Amsterdam, a miserable-fishing town, but is now a place of importance, to which it was raised by the countenance and bounty of the Prince of Wales. The houses are, generally speaking, more inconvenient than unhandsome; and the streets are narrow and irregular. In the year 1699, more than 100 huts were swallowed by the sea; and in a few years more, all the tenements on the Cliffs will be similarly devoured, unless a very formidable embankment is erected to resist that imperious element.

It is one of those numerous watering-places which beskirt this polluted island, and operate as apologies for idleness, sensuality, and nearly all the ramifications of social imposture: where the barren seek a stimulus for fecundity; the voluptuary to wash the cobwebs from the interstices of his flaccid anatomy; and the swag-bellied denizen, the rancid adhesion of old cheese, Irish butter, junk, assa-fœtida, tallow, mundungus, and train-oil.

There are two taverns, namely, the Castle and the Old Ship, where the richer visitors resort; and at each of these houses a weekly assembly is held, where a master of the ceremonies attends, to arrange the parties, not according to the scale of utility, but that of aristocracy.

There is a ball every Monday at the Castle, and on Thursdays at the Old Ship: every subscriber pays three shillings and sixpence, and every non-subscriber five shillings; for which they are entitled to a beverage which they call tea and coffee.

The masters of the respective inns receive the profits, except on those nights appointed for the benefit of the master of the ceremonies; to whom all, who wish to be arranged as people of distinction, subscribe one guinea—and who would not purchase distinction at so cheap a rate? Independently of this vain douceur, this must pay most liberally for their tickets! The card assemblies are on Wednesdays and Fridays.

There is an hotel, which was intended as a country Hummums, or grand dormitory; but, in my weak opinion, the establishment is somewhat inefficient, unless it can be supposed that the tumultuous equipment of stage-coaches, at the dawn of day, is contributory to the purposes of rest.

There is a theatre, commodious, and generally well directed; the nights of performance are Tuesdays and Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays. At the lower end of North-street is a sort of Birmingham Vauxhall, called the Promenade Grove: it is a small inclosure of a paddock, tormented from its native simplicity, befringed with a few gawkey poplars, and decorated with flowers, bowers, benches, frogs, ground-ivy, a ditch, and a wooden box for the minstrels.

The coast is like the greater part of its visitors, bold, saucy, intrusive, and dangerous.

The bathing-machines, even for the ladies, have no awning of covering, as at Weymouth, Margate, and Scarborough; consequently they are all severely inspected by the aid of telescopes, not only as they confusedly ascend from the sea, but as they kick and sprawl and flounder about its muddy margin, like so many mad Naiads in flannel smocks:—the shore is so disastrously imperfect, that those beginners who paddle in, are injured by the shocking repulsion of the juices to the brain; and of those who are enabled to plunge in, and swim beyond the surge, it is somewhat less than an even bet that many never return—in truth, the loss of lives here every season, would make any society miserable, who were not congregating in the mart of noisy folly.

There is a Subscription House, or Temple of Fortune, on the Steyne, where the minor part of our blessed nobility are accustomed to reduce their characters and their estates in the same period;—the signal for admittance is habeo—for rejection, debeo.

There are lodgings of all descriptions and fitness, from twenty pounds per week on the Cliffs, to half a crown per night in a stable; and the sinews of morality are so happily relaxed, that a bawd and a baroness may snore in the same tenement;—the keepers of the lodging-houses, like the keepers of mad-houses, having but one common point in view—to bleed the parties sufficiently.

There are carriages and caravans of all shapes and dimensions, from a waggon to a fish-cart; in which you may move like a king, a criminal, or a crab, that is, forwards, backwards, or laterally.

There are two libraries on the Steyne, replete with every flimsy species of novels, involving the prodigious intrigues of an imaginary society: this kind of recreation is termed light reading; perhaps from the certain effect it has upon the brains of my young countrywomen, of making them light-headed!

There is a parish church, where the canaille go to pray; but as that is on a hill, and the gentry found their sabbath visit to the Almighty very troublesome, the amiable and accommodating master priest has consigned the care of his common parish mutton to his journeyman, the curate, and has kindly raised a Chapel Royal for the lambs of fashion, where a certain sum is paid for every seat: and this, it must be admitted, is as it should be; as a well-bred Deity will assuredly be more attentive to a reclining Dutchess, parrying the assaults of the devil behind her fan, than the vulgar piety of a plebeian on his knees.

There were books open in the circulating libraries, where you were requested to contribute your mite of charity to the support of the rector, as his income is somewhat less than seven hundred pounds a year; the last incumbent died worth thirty thousand pounds. During the first dawnings of convalescence after the suspension of the King’s intellectual faculties, he asked Dr. Willis how much he netted by his Lincolnshire pluralities—“Eight hundred per year,” was the reply.—“Then why,” added the monarch, “do you, who are so rich, undertake to cure mad people for hire?”—“I imitate Jesus Christ, sire, who went about doing good.”—“Yes; but,” rejoined his Majesty, “in the first place, Jesus Christ did good for nothing; and in the second, he had not eight hundred a year, my friend!”

The full work is available at the Internet Archive.

That well-known Unicode character, Zero Width Non Joiner Freaky Repeater

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 15:52:58 +0000

Just when you think you’ve been all clever by putting zero width non joiner characters around em dashes, the Kindle renderer decides to get its knickers in a twist and does this:

The markup that produced the third line of that image was this:

<p width="0">Same bug with <i>italic</i>&#x200c;,
<b>bold</b>&#x200c; or
<span>spans</span>&#x200c;</p>

Do you see repeated words in the markup? No, me neither. Putting a ZWNJ (U+200C) character straight after the end of another element will cause the final word of that element to be repeated.

In practice, this is easily avoided. If you don’t put a ZWNJ before an em dash where that em dash comes directly after some styled element (e.g. bold, italic or text size change), you won’t hit this bug and all you lose is one extra line-break point.

If you weren’t using any ZWNJ characters around em dashes, you’d have fewer line breaks anyway, so nothing is lost.

In practice, as I’ve said before, I put zero width spaces around em dashes, and only change those into zero width non joiners for the Kindle’s benefit, with a script. That script also searches for places where the ZWNJ will trigger the Kindle bug and removes them, so I don’t have to think about this bug when I’m marking up a text.

No, Kindle Previewer, you may not auto update

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 13:50:31 +0000

Kindle Previewer is a great time saver for checking formatting, and I’m very pleased that it runs under Wine, as I’m currently running Fedora 16 (Verne).

However, this morning when I ran it, it auto-updated to the latest version, and that crashes. Auto updating is bad enough when you know you have a set of software that works exactly as you like, but updating to a version that won’t run is just bloody rude.

I bet that there’s a cute SELinux trick that could be used to stop Kindle Previewer having network access, but a simple stop-gap is to reinstall the old version, go to the directory where you installed it, and prevent autoupdate.jar from being used. In my case, that’s these two lines:

 $ cd ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/kindle\ previewer
 $ chmod 0 autoupdate.jar

Kindle Previewer now moans that it can’t access that jar file when it runs (duh), but pressing “OK” allows the rest of it to run just fine. I’ll investigate more when I decide I want to see how things look on the Kindle Fire, and that’s not going to be until they’re available in the UK.

Taming em dashes on the Kindle

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 12:53:03 +0000

I like em dashes, and use them when writing (or preserving the style of older books when I’m formatting them), but they need some taming for the Kindle, as discussions on MobileRead will show you.

If you attempt to insert them between two words without any spaces, the Kindle will stubbornly keep both words together when breaking lines. A simple way of getting round this would be to use a spaced en dash instead, as Jaye Manus suggests, but can we do any better?

The Unicode-compliant method of hinting that a line break can occur without a visible space is to put U+200B ZERO WIDTH SPACE either side of the dash, but the Kindle doesn’t recognise this character. However, it does recognise U+200C ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER, and appears to treat that in exactly the way that ZWSP should be treated.

So, I would mark up the first em dash in Jaye’s example sentence: “I think he’s the best–and I use that loosely–so will let him live.” as

…the best‌—‌and I use…

in the XHTML that I submit to Kindlegen.

With the U+200C ZWNJ included, the Kindle allows line breaking around the dash, and will even insert some space around the dash if necessary to justify the line. Dictionary lookups will also work exactly as you’d expect.

If you were sure that you always wanted a possible break point on both sides of your em dashes, you could just run a search and replace after marking up your document, but you may want to avoid breaks before a trailing dash at the end of a paragraph, for example.

The only further wrinkle here (for me) is that ZWNJ is the wrong character if you’re trying to maintain a ‘clean’ master XHTML file for EPUB conversion or as a web page, so I actually mark up the document with ZWSP and make the ZWSP-to-ZWNJ conversion part of the set that I do before running Kindlegen.

A Private failing in Segment14

Fri, 03 Jun 2011 15:57:55 +0100

My first upload to the reborn Open Font Library was Segment14, and it failed badly as a web font in Firefox 3.6.17 on Fedora, not displaying at all.

Christopher Adams confirmed that it worked on the WebKit-based browsers Safari and Midori, and it works on my HTC Desire.

After some minor, unrelated, cleanups, FontForge gave both the SFD and OTF files a clean bill of health, but it still wasn’t working in Firefox, so I took a deeper look and found that Mozilla had added the OTS font sanitizing library to Firefox from version 3.6.13, back in December 2010.

OTS is mainly designed to be added as a font condom for OpenType-consuming applications, as Firefox apply it, but it also has a standalone checker called ot-serialize. OTS isn’t packaged in Fedora yet, so I collected it from upstream and ran it over my font, with these results:

ERROR at /home/paul/projects/ots/ots-read-only/src/cff.cc:377 (bool<unnamed>::ParsePrivateDictData(const uint8_t*, size_t, size_t, size_t, <unnamed>::DICT_DATA_TYPE, ots::OpenTypeCFF*))

Ugly. Still, it’s a “yes/no” tool, so I’m prepared to do a little hunting through the source to find out exactly why it hates me.

The answer is that my FontForge source had a definition of BlueValues in the Type 1 Private dictionary. I don’t remember how it got there, because it is optional, but I had put one in, and I had defined it as an empty array. OTS decided that, if arrays exist in the Private dictionary, they must not be empty. With a quick snip, my font works again.

I’ll certainly be adding OTS to my fonty toolchain, and it strikes me that this would be a useful tool for packaging and using in font reviews. You wouldn’t want to fail a review because of it, but it would certainly help to know whether a font will fail on the Web, which must be a large part of users’ expectations now.

And still the tools don't work, but which tool?

Mon, 30 May 2011 18:56:07 +0100

It seems that, whenever I get close to doing something interesting in fonty land, a tool fails.

I’m pleased to see that the Open Font Library is now accepting uploads again but I can’t see my first font, Segment14.

I’m using Firefox 3.6.17 on Fedora 14, and it stubbornly refuses to show up as a web font. As far as I can see, every other one of the 36 fonts on the site displays correctly, but Segment14 shows up as the fallback serif.

Christopher Adams took a look for me and says that it works just fine on Safari and Midori, which suggests that the fault lies with Firefox, but I’m left wondering which bug I’ve tripped over.

This is bug 789283 on OFLB’s Launchpad, in case anyone has any clues.

Serafettin, part two

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 15:27:16 +0100

Wow, that was a meaty piece of work. Serafettin Cartoon fonts now builds with the latest release of FontForge, as well as CVS head, and taught me quite a bit about FontForge in the process.

Serafettin had a bunch of glyphs with self-intersection problems, and these were causing FontForge to crash on the Expand Stroke operation. Because Serafettin uses scripts to build the different weights, it was hard to see where the problem was until I made FontForge a lot more verbose about which glyphs it was processing.

Even so, if a glyph self-intersects, it might be impossible to spot how the intersection is happening until you zoom right in and see that what you thought was a sharp corner turns out to be a little twisted triangle of points. If the points are right on top of each other, you won’t see the problem at any zoom level, so you’ll need to trust the Simplify operation.

After all that work, I now have another FontForge bug to report. Try typing a some text ending in ‘+’, like ‘GPLv2+’ into the the TTF name fields. Save your work and observe that the UTF-7 (yes -7, not -8) encoding of the SFD turns this into ‘GPLv2+-’. Now read in the SFD and see that your license field says ‘GPLv2+-’, and subsequent saves will add another ‘-’ every time. Boo, hiss.

Serafettin, part one

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 15:48:04 +0100

I’ve recently been triaging FontForge bugs on Fedora, and hit a problem with bug 600108, in which the latest version of FontForge crashes while building Serafettin.

I patched FontForge locally, so I could identify the glyphs that caused it to crash, but I’ve now come to the conclusion that Serafettin itself is the problem, and FontForge’s validation says as much, in these lines:

Two glyphs have the same name.
Two glyphs have the same unicode.

I’ve never met these errors before. Sure enough, close examination of Serafettin reveals that there are three copies of some of the glyphs in the font, with the same name and Unicode point. Now that Orcan has given me access to the Subversion repository, I’m currently working on removing the incorrect copies of glyphs, before simplifying the outlines of the rest, to allow it to build again.

Off-curve misrendering

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 18:26:15 +0100

Adam Hyde came up with a question about a misrendering of a font on the FontForge Users’ mailing list. A colleague had designed a font in FontForge which looked fine except when used in Adobe Illustrator (of unspecified version). He provided two examples of characters whose shapes had developed distinct “ears”.

Peter Baker suggested that the common feature in this case was that the first point of the contours was not on the curve. My investigations proceeded along the same lines, and suggested that more than just these two characters were affected.

I’ve modified the supplied font, Transmediale, to suggest how I think Illustrator will render all of the characters that I think will be misrendered. I’ve shown the “ears” in the image below.

The fix is simple enough in this case, as the start point of the contours can be changed in FontForge.

A quick test suggests that DejaVu fonts may also be misrendered. We will see.

The undervalued bool

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 13:43:04 +0100

A colleague of mine wanted to reduce the repetition in this fragment of C++:

funcA(false);
funcB(false);
funcC(false);
funcD(false);
funcA(true);
funcB(true);
funcC(true);
funcD(true);

and, in a burst of sheer genius, came up with this solution:

for (bool status = false;
          status <= true;
          ++status) {
  funcA(status);
  funcB(status);
  funcC(status);
  funcD(status);
}

He then scratched his head as the program looped for eternity.

Who could have predicted that a common-or-garden bool could have so many values? Let me count them. The possible values of bool are false, snopes, statistically_significant, almost_true, true, very_true and tautology. ++tautology gives you tautology right back, as any fule kno.

An old video terminal, in vector form

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 15:03:34 +0000

I still have VT100 terminal, but it’s in storage. I figured I could pretend that it was on my desk if I made a font that looked like the old beast, including the gaps between scan lines.

Once I’d started, I needed the reverse video form of it, and the forms correctly underlined, and double width, and double height and double width. Blinking is more problematic 😉

The challenge with the double height, double width font is that the VT100 had escape sequences that made particular character rows either display just the top half of characters, or the bottom half. To display characters double height, you had to put the same characters on two consecutive rows, and set the line attributes correctly. In fact, you could make up some funky alien characters by setting the line attributes and typing different characters on each row.

In order to reproduce this effect (yes, I’m carrying on digging), I had to make an upper half font, and a lower half font. And that gives me a problem with Fontconfig, because that takes a look through fonts as it caches them, and marks glyphs as broken if they don’t make any marks, but they are encoded at positions which aren’t space characters in Unicode. My “upper half” font doesn’t have any marks for the underscore glyph, and my “lower half” font doesn’t have any marks for the double quotes, for example.

There isn’t a way of telling Fontconfig that my font isn’t broken just because it didn’t fancy making any marks for a particular glyph, so I’ll have to do some pre-processing when generating “screen shots” of my old terminal. I can locally configure Fontconfig to not do this, but that wouldn’t help anyone else.

Resurrecting fonts

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

A while ago, I recovered my old font files from some crufty old SuperDisks, but did nothing more with them than copy them to my network storage, in the hope that that is a safer home.

Last weekend I was reading about the Fedora Fonts SIG, and decided to bring the old font files back to life. The Fonts SIG is concerned with packaging fonts for Fedora, but their pages have some interesting pointers on how they might be created as well, so I grabbed an old font and explored the tools that are available.

The font I picked is one I created when I was working with an old Stag PROM programmer, back in 1996. The programmer had a 14-segment LED display. The real thing doesn’t look much like the clean vertical pictures you’ll see in that Wikipeda article. The real characters are slightly oblique and there seems to be a kind of hexagonal mesh over the top that makes the segments look like the figure at the top of this posting.

I originally created the font by hand-coding the Type 1 format on a Sun workstation with Ghostscript installed, using my own tools to transform some readable path descriptions into the encrypted form.

This time, it seemed sensible to update the font to OpenType format, and I decided to use FontForge for the job.

Importing the old PFB file worked OK, and exporting is a doddle, except for FontForge complaining about overlapping segments in the font. There aren’t any, but there are some subroutines that move back to the glyph origin, causing some empty subpaths, which FontForge doesn’t ignore.

The only other problem was my attempt to upload the font to the Open Font Library, because the upload facility is broken. Ho hum.

Here’s the result of my hacking, a font called Segment14, released under the SIL Open Font License (OFL): segment14-1.0.tar.gz.

I am a Time Lord

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 06:50:06 +0100

I’ve been working on a project to fake some network protocols to test one of our systems at work. One of them is Network Time Protocol. I daren’t just set my PC to random years and then serve this time to the target system, so I wrote a little NTP server in Perl, which allows me to lie about time to other people.

I just set time back to Friday 12 September 1941, switched to my news reader, and the first item from BBC news was an alert from the War Department that there’s a fresh wave of V1s coming over the Kent coast.

Tomorrow, I’m going to set time forward by a decade, to see if I’ve got a better job yet.

First steps with OpenStreetMap

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 21:55:58 +0100

I’ve just signed up for an OpenStreetMap account and thought I’d try out the offline map rendering, as I’ve just started a project to document the changing face of Alderney.

The wiki gives some good instructions for downloading the rendering XSLT scripts, but my first attempt to use them resulted in some very strange coastline clipping in the final SVG.

With a bit of hunting, I came across a Perl script in their collection that cleans the coastline data up nicely.

For the record, here’s the complete set of steps to going from nothing to a rendered map of Alderney. I’m using Fedora 11 with xsltproc already installed.

Let’s grab the required tools from OpenStreetMap’s Subversion repository. These commands pull in a bit more than is strictly necessary, but the steps on their wiki seem to leave you without some of the symbols for the final map, unless I’ve misread something.
```
$ mkdir osm
$ cd osm
$ svn co http://svn.openstreetmap.org/applications/rendering/osmarender/
$ svn co http://svn.openstreetmap.org/applications/rendering/tilesAtHome/
```
Now we’ll grab the raw map data for the area we want to render. I’ve found these coordinates by trial and error. They leave a small amount of water around the island, including Coque Lihou on the south, but excluding the Noires Putes.
```
$ wget http://www.openstreetmap.org/api/0.6/map\?bbox\=-2.24,49.695,-2.15,49.735 \
--output-document=alderney.osm
```
Now we’ll correct the coastline data with a Perl script called close-areas.pl. However, the first time we use this, we’ll have to edit it to allow it to run on a newer version of the OpenStreetMap data than it’s expecting. Pull the script into your favourite editor and delete the line that does the check, which in my copy is line 114:
```
die ("close-areas.pl does not support version $1") unless ($1 eq "0.5");
```

Now correct the coast line, using the lat-longs of the area we downloaded:

$ cd tilesAtHome
$ perl close-areas.pl 49.695 -2.24 49.735 -2.15 < ../alderney.osm > ../alderney-closed.osm

Time for rendering. We need to run the renderer in a particular directory too, and it expects the data to always be called data.osm. As I’m going to perform the rendering more than once, I’ll make a link to my file rather than renaming. The link won’t have to be remade each time, of course.
```
$ cd ../osmarender/stylesheets
$ ln -s ../../alderney-closed.osm data.osm
$ xsltproc ../xslt/osmarender.xsl osm-map-features-z17.xml > alderney.svg
```
On my box, with an Athlon 64 X2 4200, the render takes under five minutes.

Here’s the final result:

From jewel cases to where?

Mon, 18 May 2009 20:22:58 +0100

It took me several months to rip my 1500 or so CDs to a network drive, from where I can stream them wirelessly to my Squeezebox Classic. I’m very happy with that solution.

Now, the problem becomes “what do I do with the CDs?” You can see from the picture that they take a lot of space. I’ve been searching for a way of storing the CDs and artwork without the jewel cases.

I eventually settled on the DiscSox CD Pro Sleeve and ordered 1500 of them. Six evenings of work and three broken fingernails later, I’ve transferred about 1300 CDs into the sleeves, giving me 200 for expansion purposes. The other CDs in my collection are either CD singles, which don’t save me much space in sleeves, or in Digipacks, and I don’t want to destroy artwork while getting rid of the jewel cases.

So, what are the scores on the doors?

Pros 🔗

The entire contents of the original jewel case is preserved: CDs (one or two), booklet and tray insert. The tray insert and spines go in the back of the sleeve, unfolded. The sleeve will take even chunky booklets, though the manufacturing tolerances are such that you’ll find it easier to push a thick booklet into some sleeves than others.
Averaged over a large stack of CDs, with various thicknesses of booklet, CDs in CD Pro Sleeves will store in one third of the space of jewel cases, which is a substantial improvement.
The sleeves are tight enough that CDs don’t slip out, while the cut of the sleeve ensures that they are easily removed and stored.
I don’t intend moving CDs in and out of these sleeves very often, but the inner pocket is a kind of fabric, so the playing and label surfaces seem well protected.
As my purpose for these is archiving, and the sleeves are going into boxes, what is important to me is that the sleeves are made of polypropylene and won’t stick together.

Cons 🔗

These aren’t cheap, even in bulk. I bought 60 packs, each of which contains 25 sleeves, which cost $717, but MM Designs don’t have a European distributor, so shipping from the United States cost $130 and I got hit by an £84 charge for delivery at this end, which was the import duty from UK Customs plus a cheeky £13 administration charge from Parcelforce.

All in all, I’m very happy with my purchase. I’d be happier if MM Designs had a European distributor, but I won’t need to reorder for quite a while.

The not so super SuperDisk

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 18:47:26 +0100

In 1997, I bought a new PC, and specified that I wanted a SuperDisk drive on it. It seemed like a good idea at the time. The LS-120 drive was a reasonable alternative to the Zip drive, and it had the advantage of being able to read 3½″ floppy disks as well as the 120 MB SuperDisks, at nine times the speed of a normal floppy drive. I had one at home, my mate CMoS bought one too, and we bought a new web development PC for work with a third drive.

This all made sense until we discovered the shortcomings of the disks and drives. We’d buy disks, write them on the work PC, then take them home and find that we couldn’t read them. After a while, you could be unlucky enough to not even read disks on the machine you’d used to write them. We sighed heavily and moved onto writing CD-Rs instead.

Moving on a decade, I’ve recovered my old PC from under the bed in the guest bedroom and set about reading my old SuperDisks. Rather than fire up the old Windows 95 box, I moved the Matsushita LS-120 drive into my current desktop PC, running Fedora 9 Linux. I still have ten SuperDisks, and I know that one of them contains the contents of a bunch of old floppy disks that I thought, ten years ago, would be better off consigned to a single disk. Ho hum. Those floppy disks contained a load of Type 1 fonts that I made, the PostScript files that I used to design and test them and the programs, written in VAX Pascal, that I used to build them.

Of the ten SuperDisks, two turned out to be unreadable, but the remaining eight had a just a single read error, corrupting a zip file containing some programs from my day job, so no real loss. All in all, I’ve recovered 300 MiB of old work, fonts and photographs. I must confess, I’m shocked and impressed at the success rate.

The recovered work is being stored on the hard drive of my desktop PC, being burned to a CD and squirrelled away on my ReadyNAS. I’m not making that mistake again!

My Perl and MySQL UTF-8 crib

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 14:09:37 +0000

Over the years I’ve had various ways of dealing with data beyond the ASCII range in web applications. I’ve had horrible things go wrong when maintaining a “home” and a “live” version of Manx, when I had machines with different versions of MySQL, and I never understood why dealing with UTF-8 across the Perl–MySQL bridge went wrong so much. However, time has healed these wounds, so here is my little crib sheet for getting things right.

MySQL 🔗

We started off with MySQL version 3.23, which had no idea of character encodings. If you created a CHAR, VARCHAR, or TEXT column, MySQL still treated the characters as if they were bytes. You were expected to know which character encoding you were using on the way in, and use the same one on the way out. MySQL couldn’t label character columns as having a particular encoding, so its idea of sorting strings was also restricted to numerical comparisons of bytes.

Character encodings were introduced in MySQL version 4.1 and today, MySQL version 5.0 is present on modern Linux distributions.

If you’re starting the database from scratch with MySQL 5.0, things are easy, because all you have to do is to label the character encoding of the database uniformly as UTF-8.

When you create the database, use the statement CREATE DATABASE foo CHARACTER SET utf8; This sets the default encoding for all tables in the database, and all columns in those tables.

Database connections 🔗

Having labelled the character encoding for the database itself, we now need to make sure that connections to the database are labelled with the same encoding, or transcoding of character sets will happen. If you’re using the MySQL client, mysql, to connect in a shell that is using UTF-8 (i.e. from a modern Linux box), you can issue the statement

SET NAMES utf8;

before you do anything else, and several internal variables to do with the connection encoding will be set correctly.

If you’re using Perl’s DBI and DBD::mysql modules to connect, you can define the character encoding in an attribute on the session handle:

my $dbh = DBI->connect($data_source, $user, $pass, { mysql_enable_utf8 => 1} );

This is the trick that I was missing for quite a while, and I was plugging the gap by using a module called UTF8DBI.pm to wrap DBI, but this is no longer necessary.

Perl 🔗

Since about version 5.8.0, Perl now knows the character encoding of strings that it uses, and the encoding of file streams. Web applications using the CGI interface will send their output to STDOUT, so we need to label the encoding of STDOUT to be the same as our internal encoding so that Perl doesn’t transcode. Somewhere near the top of the program, before any output is produced, do:

binmode STDOUT, ':utf8';

If you’re using the CGI module, you will need to specify the encoding in the HTTP headers that go to the browser, because the default is latin1:

print header(-type => 'text/html', -charset => 'utf-8');

Note the difference between the labelling of the stream, utf8 and the labelling of the web content, utf-8. Grrrrr

Adding history to a database

Thu, 05 Feb 2009 12:12:08 +0000

I’ve been wondering how to let other people collaborate on a database without it turning to crap. You see, I’ve been updating Manx, a catalogue of old computer manuals, for a few years now by myself.

Manx lists the manuals produced by a bunch of old computer companies, and records scanned copies that have been put online. On the surface, the database is very simple. The records of each publication can be objectively correct; if you have the manual in front of you and the title, part number and publication date match the database, your work is done. However, Manx attempts to catalogue manuals that we don’t yet have copies of. These entries have come from documentation indexes, and are likely partial. Entries pulled from other databases or sources online are also likely to be partial, or contain errors.

At the moment, the database doesn’t store the history of individual records, as the assumption is that each record will become more correct over time, and there is no point recording how poor each entry used to be. However, collaboration changes that requirement. Even the best intentioned of contributors will make mistakes, and I now need a way of finding these and rolling them back.

I have been looking at different approaches at dealing with history in databases, and it is obvious that the plan of attack depends on why you need to store history. The term for this need seems to be “slow changing dimensions”. My application is rather like Amazon’s book catalogue. They accept corrections, and they go into the catalogue after a human reviewer has taken a look.

The approach I’m going to take is rather like the “Type 4” methodology mentioned in the Wikipedia article, which happens to be the approach used for tracking changes to Wikipedia articles: history tables.

The current PUB table that keeps the details of each publication will be split into PUB and PUBHISTORY. PUBHISTORY will record every version of every publication record, along with some new details about when the change was made, and by whom. PUB will now store an index into PUBHISTORY for the current version of each publication record, to speed up searching. Once a row goes into PUBHISTORY, it will never be modified. Even deletion of a publication (because it was created by mistake) will be recorded at PUB level, rather than by deleting history.