PART I.
CHAPTER
I—THE BROWN FAMILY
“I'm the Poet of White Horse Vale, sir,
With liberal notions under my cap.”—Ballad
The Browns have become illustrious by the pen of
Thackeray and the pencil of Doyle, within the memory of the young gentlemen who
are now matriculating at the universities. Notwithstanding the well-merited but
late fame which has now fallen upon them, any one at all acquainted with the
family must feel that much has yet to be written and said before the British
nation will be properly sensible of how much of its greatness it owes to the
Browns. For centuries, in their quiet, dogged, homespun way, they have been
subduing the earth in most English counties, and leaving their mark in American
forests and Australian uplands. Wherever the fleets and armies of England have
won renown, there stalwart sons of the Browns have done yeomen's work. With the
yew bow and cloth-yard shaft at Cressy and Agincourt—with the brown bill and
pike under the brave Lord Willoughby—with culverin and demi-culverin against
Spaniards and Dutchmen—with hand-grenade and sabre, and musket and bayonet,
under Rodney and St. Vincent, Wolfe and Moore, Nelson and Wellington, they have
carried their lives in their hands, getting hard knocks and hard work in
plenty—which was on the whole what they looked for, and the best thing for
them—and little praise or pudding, which indeed they, and most of us, are
better without. Talbots and Stanleys, St. Maurs, and such-like folk, have led
armies and made laws time out of mind; but those noble families would be
somewhat astounded—if the accounts ever came to be fairly taken—to find how
small their work for England has been by the side of that of the Browns.
These latter, indeed, have, until the present
generation, rarely been sung by poet, or chronicled by sage. They have wanted
their sacer vates, having been too solid to rise to the top by themselves, and
not having been largely gifted with the talent of catching hold of, and holding
on tight to, whatever good things happened to be going—the foundation of the
fortunes of so many noble families. But the world goes on its way, and the
wheel turns, and the wrongs of the Browns, like other wrongs, seem in a fair
way to get righted. And this present writer, having for many years of his life
been a devout Brown-worshipper, and, moreover, having the honour of being
nearly connected with an eminently respectable branch of the great Brown
family, is anxious, so far as in him lies, to help the wheel over, and throw
his stone on to the pile.
However, gentle reader, or simple reader,
whichever you may be, lest you should be led to waste your precious time upon
these pages, I make so bold as at once to tell you the sort of folk you'll have
to meet and put up with, if you and I are to jog on comfortably together. You
shall hear at once what sort of folk the Browns are—at least my branch of them;
and then, if you don't like the sort, why, cut the concern at once, and let you
and I cry quits before either of us can grumble at the other.
In the first place, the Browns are a fighting
family. One may question their wisdom, or wit, or beauty, but about their fight
there can be no question. Wherever hard knocks of any kind, visible or
invisible, are going; there the Brown who is nearest must shove in his carcass.
And these carcasses, for the most part, answer very well to the characteristic
propensity: they are a squareheaded and snake-necked generation, broad in the
shoulder, deep in the chest, and thin in the flank, carrying no lumber. Then
for clanship, they are as bad as Highlanders; it is amazing the belief they
have in one another. With them there is nothing like the Browns, to the third
and fourth generation. “Blood is thicker than water,” is one of their pet
sayings. They can't be happy unless they are always meeting one another. Never
were such people for family gatherings; which, were you a stranger, or
sensitive, you might think had better not have been gathered together. For
during the whole time of their being together they luxuriate in telling one
another their minds on whatever subject turns up; and their minds are
wonderfully antagonistic, and all their opinions are downright beliefs. Till
you've been among them some time and understand them, you can't think but that
they are quarrelling. Not a bit of it. They love and respect one another ten
times the more after a good set family arguing bout, and go back, one to his curacy,
another to his chambers, and another to his regiment, freshened for work, and
more than ever convinced that the Browns are the height of company.
This family training, too, combined with their
turn for combativeness, makes them eminently quixotic. They can't let anything
alone which they think going wrong. They must speak their mind about it,
annoying all easy-going folk, and spend their time and money in having a tinker
at it, however hopeless the job. It is an impossibility to a Brown to leave the
most disreputable lame dog on the other side of a stile. Most other folk get
tired of such work. The old Browns, with red faces, white whiskers, and bald
heads, go on believing and fighting to a green old age. They have always a
crotchet going, till the old man with the scythe reaps and garners them away
for troublesome old boys as they are.
And the most provoking thing is, that no failures
knock them up, or make them hold their hands, or think you, or me, or other
sane people in the right. Failures slide off them like July rain off a duck's
back feathers. Jem and his whole family turn out bad, and cheat them one week,
and the next they are doing the same thing for Jack; and when he goes to the
treadmill, and his wife and children to the workhouse, they will be on the
lookout for Bill to take his place.
However, it is time for us to get from the general
to the particular; so, leaving the great army of Browns, who are scattered over
the whole empire on which the sun never sets, and whose general diffusion I take
to be the chief cause of that empire's stability; let us at once fix our
attention upon the small nest of Browns in which our hero was hatched, and
which dwelt in that portion of the royal county of Berks which is called the
Vale of White Horse.
Most of you have probably travelled down the Great
Western Railway as far as Swindon. Those of you who did so with their eyes open
have been aware, soon after leaving the Didcot station, of a fine range of
chalk hills running parallel with the railway on the left-hand side as you go
down, and distant some two or three miles, more or less, from the line. The
highest point in the range is the White Horse Hill, which you come in front of
just before you stop at the Shrivenham station. If you love English scenery, and
have a few hours to spare, you can't do better, the next time you pass, than
stop at the Farringdon Road or Shrivenham station, and make your way to that
highest point. And those who care for the vague old stories that haunt
country-sides all about England, will not, if they are wise, be content with
only a few hours' stay; for, glorious as the view is, the neighbourhood is yet
more interesting for its relics of bygone times. I only know two English
neighbourhoods thoroughly, and in each, within a circle of five miles, there is
enough of interest and beauty to last any reasonable man his life. I believe
this to be the case almost throughout the country, but each has a special
attraction, and none can be richer than the one I am speaking of and going to introduce
you to very particularly, for on this subject I must be prosy; so those that
don't care for England in detail may skip the chapter.
O young England! young England! you who are born
into these racing railroad times, when there's a Great Exhibition, or some
monster sight, every year, and you can get over a couple of thousand miles of
ground for three pound ten in a five-weeks' holiday, why don't you know more of
your own birthplaces? You're all in the ends of the earth, it seems to me, as
soon as you get your necks out of the educational collar, for midsummer
holidays, long vacations, or what not—going round Ireland, with a return
ticket, in a fortnight; dropping your copies of Tennyson on the tops of Swiss
mountains; or pulling down the Danube in Oxford racing boats. And when you get
home for a quiet fortnight, you turn the steam off, and lie on your backs in
the paternal garden, surrounded by the last batch of books from Mudie's
library, and half bored to death. Well, well! I know it has its good side. You
all patter French more or less, and perhaps German; you have seen men and
cities, no doubt, and have your opinions, such as they are, about schools of
painting, high art, and all that; have seen the pictures of Dresden and the
Louvre, and know the taste of sour krout. All I say is, you don't know your own
lanes and woods and fields. Though you may be choke-full of science, not one in
twenty of you knows where to find the wood-sorrel, or bee-orchis, which grow in
the next wood, or on the down three miles off, or what the bog-bean and
wood-sage are good for. And as for the country legends, the stories of the old
gable-ended farmhouses, the place where the last skirmish was fought in the
civil wars, where the parish butts stood, where the last highwayman turned to
bay, where the last ghost was laid by the parson, they're gone out of date
altogether.
Now, in my time, when we got home by the old
coach, which put us down at the cross-roads with our boxes, the first day of
the holidays, and had been driven off by the family coachman, singing “Dulce
Domum” at the top of our voices, there we were, fixtures, till black Monday
came round. We had to cut out our own amusements within a walk or a ride of
home. And so we got to know all the country folk and their ways and songs and
stories by heart, and went over the fields and woods and hills, again and
again, till we made friends of them all. We were Berkshire, or Gloucestershire,
or Yorkshire boys; and you're young cosmopolites, belonging to all countries
and no countries. No doubt it's all right; I dare say it is. This is the day of
large views, and glorious humanity, and all that; but I wish back-sword play
hadn't gone out in the Vale of White Horse, and that that confounded Great
Western hadn't carried away Alfred's Hill to make an embankment.
But to return to the said Vale of White Horse, the
country in which the first scenes of this true and interesting story are laid.
As I said, the Great Western now runs right through it, and it is a land of
large, rich pastures bounded by ox-fences, and covered with fine hedgerow
timber, with here and there a nice little gorse or spinney, where abideth poor
Charley, having no other cover to which to betake himself for miles and miles,
when pushed out some fine November morning by the old Berkshire. Those who have
been there, and well mounted, only know how he and the stanch little pack who
dash after him—heads high and sterns low, with a breast-high scent—can consume
the ground at such times. There being little ploughland, and few woods, the
Vale is only an average sporting country, except for hunting. The villages are
straggling, queer, old-fashioned places, the houses being dropped down without
the least regularity, in nooks and out-of-the-way corners, by the sides of shadowy
lanes and footpaths, each with its patch of garden. They are built chiefly of
good gray stone, and thatched; though I see that within the last year or two
the red-brick cottages are multiplying, for the Vale is beginning to
manufacture largely both bricks and tiles. There are lots of waste ground by
the side of the roads in every village, amounting often to village greens,
where feed the pigs and ganders of the people; and these roads are
old-fashioned, homely roads, very dirty and badly made, and hardly endurable in
winter, but still pleasant jog-trot roads running through the great
pasture-lands, dotted here and there with little clumps of thorns, where the
sleek kine are feeding, with no fence on either side of them, and a gate at the
end of each field, which makes you get out of your gig (if you keep one), and
gives you a chance of looking about you every quarter of a mile.
One of the moralists whom we sat under in our
youth—was it the great Richard Swiveller, or Mr. Stiggins—says, “We are born in
a vale, and must take the consequences of being found in such a situation.”
These consequences I, for one, am ready to encounter. I pity people who weren't
born in a vale. I don't mean a flat country; but a vale—that is, a flat country
bounded by hills. The having your hill always in view if you choose to turn
towards him—that's the essence of a vale. There he is for ever in the distance,
your friend and companion. You never lose him as you do in hilly districts.
And then what a hill is the White Horse Hill! There
it stands right up above all the rest, nine hundred feet above the sea, and the
boldest, bravest shape for a chalk hill that you ever saw. Let us go up to the
top of him, and see what is to be found there. Ay, you may well wonder and
think it odd you never heard of this before; but wonder or not, as you please,
there are hundreds of such things lying about England, which wiser folk than
you know nothing of, and care nothing for. Yes, it's a magnificent Roman camp,
and no mistake, with gates and ditch and mounds, all as complete as it was
twenty years after the strong old rogues left it. Here, right up on the highest
point, from which they say you can see eleven counties, they trenched round all
the table-land, some twelve or fourteen acres, as was their custom, for they
couldn't bear anybody to overlook them, and made their eyrie. The ground falls
away rapidly on all sides. Was there ever such turf in the whole world? You
sink up to your ankles at every step, and yet the spring of it is delicious.
There is always a breeze in the “camp,” as it is called; and here it lies, just
as the Romans left it, except that cairn on the east side, left by her
Majesty's corps of sappers and miners the other day, when they and the engineer
officer had finished their sojourn there, and their surveys for the ordnance
map of Berkshire. It is altogether a place that you won't forget, a place to
open a man's soul, and make him prophesy, as he looks down on that great Vale
spread out as the garden of the Lord before him, and wave on wave of the
mysterious downs behind, and to the right and left the chalk hills running away
into the distance, along which he can trace for miles the old Roman road, “the
Ridgeway” (“the Rudge,” as the country folk call it), keeping straight along the
highest back of the hills—such a place as Balak brought Balaam to, and told him
to prophesy against the people in the valley beneath. And he could not, neither
shall you, for they are a people of the Lord who abide there.
And now we leave the camp, and descend towards the
west, and are on the Ashdown. We are treading on heroes. It is sacred ground
for Englishmen—more sacred than all but one or two fields where their bones lie
whitening. For this is the actual place where our Alfred won his great battle, the
battle of Ashdown (“Aescendum” in the chroniclers), which broke the Danish
power, and made England a Christian land. The Danes held the camp and the slope
where we are standing—the whole crown of the hill, in fact. “The heathen had
beforehand seized the higher ground,” as old Asser says, having wasted
everything behind them from London, and being just ready to burst down on the
fair Vale, Alfred's own birthplace and heritage. And up the heights came the
Saxons, as they did at the Alma. “The Christians led up their line from the
lower ground. There stood also on that same spot a single thorn-tree,
marvellous stumpy (which we ourselves with our very own eyes have seen).” Bless
the old chronicler! Does he think nobody ever saw the “single thorn-tree” but himself?
Why, there it stands to this very day, just on the edge of the slope, and I saw
it not three weeks since—an old single thorn-tree, “marvellous stumpy.” At
least, if it isn't the same tree it ought to have been, for it's just in the
place where the battle must have been won or lost—“around which, as I was
saying, the two lines of foemen came together in battle with a huge shout. And
in this place one of the two kings of the heathen and five of his earls fell
down and died, and many thousands of the heathen side in the same place.” *
After which crowning mercy, the pious king, that there might never be wanting a
sign and a memorial to the country-side, carved out on the northern side of the
chalk hill, under the camp, where it is almost precipitous, the great Saxon
White Horse, which he who will may see from the railway, and which gives its
name to the Vale, over which it has looked these thousand years and more.
* “Pagani editiorem Iocum
praeoccupaverant. Christiani ab
inferiori loco aciem dirigebant. Erat quoque in eodem loco
unica spinosa arbor, brevis admodum (quam
nos ipsi nostris
propriis oculis vidimus). Circa quam ergo hostiles inter se
acies cum ingenti clamore hostiliter
conveniunt. Quo in
loco alter de duobus Paganorum regibus et
quinque comites
occisi occubuerunt, et multa millia
Paganae partis in eodem
loco.
Cecidit illic ergo Boegsceg Rex, et Sidroc ille senex
comes, et Sidroc Junior comes, et Obsbern
comes,” etc.—
Annales Rerum Gestarum AElfredi Magni, Auctore Asserio.
Recensuit Franciscus Wise. Oxford,
1722, p.23.
Right down below the White Horse is a curious deep
and broad gully called “the Manger,” into one side of which the hills fall with
a series of the most lovely sweeping curves, known as “the Giant's Stairs.”
They are not a bit like stairs, but I never saw anything like them anywhere
else, with their short green turf, and tender bluebells, and gossamer and
thistle-down gleaming in the sun and the sheep-paths running along their sides
like ruled lines.
The other side of the Manger is formed by the
Dragon's Hill, a curious little round self-confident fellow, thrown forward
from the range, utterly unlike everything round him. On this hill some
deliverer of mankind—St. George, the country folk used to tell me—killed a
dragon. Whether it were St. George, I cannot say; but surely a dragon was
killed there, for you may see the marks yet where his blood ran down, and more
by token the place where it ran down is the easiest way up the hillside.
Passing along the Ridgeway to the west for about a
mile, we come to a little clump of young beech and firs, with a growth of thorn
and privet underwood. Here you may find nests of the strong down partridge and
peewit, but take care that the keeper isn't down upon you; and in the middle of
it is an old cromlech, a huge flat stone raised on seven or eight others, and
led up to by a path, with large single stones set up on each side. This is
Wayland Smith's cave, a place of classic fame now; but as Sir Walter has
touched it, I may as well let it alone, and refer you to “Kenilworth” for the
legend.
The thick, deep wood which you see in the hollow,
about a mile off, surrounds Ashdown Park, built by Inigo Jones. Four broad
alleys are cut through the wood from circumference to centre, and each leads to
one face of the house. The mystery of the downs hangs about house and wood, as
they stand there alone, so unlike all around, with the green slopes studded
with great stones just about this part, stretching away on all sides. It was a
wise Lord Craven, I think, who pitched his tent there.
Passing along the Ridgeway to the east, we soon
come to cultivated land. The downs, strictly so called, are no more. Lincolnshire
farmers have been imported, and the long, fresh slopes are sheep-walks no more,
but grow famous turnips and barley. One of these improvers lives over there at
the “Seven Barrows” farm, another mystery of the great downs. There are the
barrows still, solemn and silent, like ships in the calm sea, the sepulchres of
some sons of men. But of whom? It is three miles from the White Horse—too far
for the slain of Ashdown to be buried there. Who shall say what heroes are
waiting there? But we must get down into the Vale again, and so away by the
Great Western Railway to town, for time and the printer's devil press, and it
is a terrible long and slippery descent, and a shocking bad road. At the
bottom, however, there is a pleasant public; whereat we must really take a
modest quencher, for the down air is provocative of thirst. So we pull up under
an old oak which stands before the door.
“What is the name of your hill, landlord?”
“Blawing STWUN Hill, sir, to be sure.”
[READER. “Stuym?”
AUTHOR: “Stone, stupid—the Blowing Stone.”]
“And of your house? I can't make out the sign.”
“Blawing Stwun, sir,” says the landlord, pouring
out his old ale from a Toby Philpot jug, with a melodious crash, into the
long-necked glass.
“What queer names!” say we, sighing at the end of
our draught, and holding out the glass to be replenished.
“Bean't queer at all, as I can see, sir,” says
mine host, handing back our glass, “seeing as this here is the Blawing Stwun,
his self,” putting his hand on a square lump of stone, some three feet and a
half high, perforated with two or three queer holes, like petrified
antediluvian rat-holes, which lies there close under the oak, under our very
nose. We are more than ever puzzled, and drink our second glass of ale,
wondering what will come next. “Like to hear un, sir?” says mine host, setting
down Toby Philpot on the tray, and resting both hands on the “Stwun.” We are
ready for anything; and he, without waiting for a reply, applies his mouth to
one of the ratholes. Something must come of it, if he doesn't burst. Good
heavens! I hope he has no apoplectic tendencies. Yes, here it comes, sure
enough, a gruesome sound between a moan and a roar, and spreads itself away
over the valley, and up the hillside, and into the woods at the back of the
house, a ghost-like, awful voice. “Um do say, sir,” says mine host, rising
purple-faced, while the moan is still coming out of the Stwun, “as they used in
old times to warn the country-side by blawing the Stwun when the enemy was
a-comin', and as how folks could make un heered then for seven mile round;
leastways, so I've heered Lawyer Smith say, and he knows a smart sight about
them old times.” We can hardly swallow Lawyer Smith's seven miles; but could
the blowing of the stone have been a summons, a sort of sending the fiery cross
round the neighbourhood in the old times? What old times? Who knows? We pay for
our beer, and are thankful.
“And what's the name of the village just below,
landlord?”
“Kingstone Lisle, sir.”
“Fine plantations you've got here?”
“Yes, sir; the Squire's 'mazing fond of trees and
such like.”
“No wonder. He's got some real beauties to be fond
of. Good-day, landlord.”
“Good-day, sir, and a pleasant ride to 'ee.”
And now, my boys, you whom I want to get for
readers, have you had enough? Will you give in at once, and say you're
convinced, and let me begin my story, or will you have more of it? Remember,
I've only been over a little bit of the hillside yet—what you could ride round
easily on your ponies in an hour. I'm only just come down into the Vale, by
Blowing Stone Hill; and if I once begin about the Vale, what's to stop me?
You'll have to hear all about Wantage, the birthplace of Alfred, and
Farringdon, which held out so long for Charles the First (the Vale was near
Oxford, and dreadfully malignant—full of Throgmortons, Puseys, and Pyes, and
such like; and their brawny retainers). Did you ever read Thomas Ingoldsby's
“Legend of Hamilton Tighe”? If you haven't, you ought to have. Well, Farringdon
is where he lived, before he went to sea; his real name was Hamden Pye, and the
Pyes were the great folk at Farringdon. Then there's Pusey. You've heard of the
Pusey horn, which King Canute gave to the Puseys of that day, and which the
gallant old squire, lately gone to his rest (whom Berkshire freeholders turned
out of last Parliament, to their eternal disgrace, for voting according to his
conscience), used to bring out on high days, holidays, and bonfire nights. And
the splendid old cross church at Uffington, the Uffingas town. How the whole countryside
teems with Saxon names and memories! And the old moated grange at Compton,
nestled close under the hillside, where twenty Marianas may have lived, with
its bright water-lilies in the moat, and its yew walk, “the cloister walk,” and
its peerless terraced gardens. There they all are, and twenty things beside,
for those who care about them, and have eyes. And these are the sort of things
you may find, I believe, every one of you, in any common English country
neighbourhood.
Will you look for them under your own noses, or
will you not? Well, well, I've done what I can to make you; and if you will go
gadding over half Europe now, every holidays, I can't help it. I was born and
bred a west-country man, thank God! a Wessex man, a citizen of the noblest
Saxon kingdom of Wessex, a regular “Angular Saxon,” the very soul of me
adscriptus glebae. There's nothing like the old country-side for me, and no
music like the twang of the real old Saxon tongue, as one gets it fresh from
the veritable chaw in the White Horse Vale; and I say with “Gaarge Ridler,” the
old west-country yeoman,—
“Throo
aall the waarld owld Gaarge would bwoast,
Commend
me to merry owld England mwoast;
While
vools gwoes prating vur and nigh,
We stwops
at whum, my dog and I.”
Here, at any rate, lived and stopped at home
Squire Brown, J.P. for the county of Berks, in a village near the foot of the
White Horse range. And here he dealt out justice and mercy in a rough way, and
begat sons and daughters, and hunted the fox, and grumbled at the badness of
the roads and the times. And his wife dealt out stockings, and calico shirts,
and smock frocks, and comforting drinks to the old folks with the “rheumatiz,”
and good counsel to all; and kept the coal and clothes' clubs going, for
yule-tide, when the bands of mummers came round, dressed out in ribbons and
coloured paper caps, and stamped round the Squire's kitchen, repeating in true
sing-song vernacular the legend of St. George and his fight, and the ten-pound
doctor, who plays his part at healing the Saint—a relic, I believe, of the old
Middle-age mysteries. It was the first dramatic representation which greeted
the eyes of little Tom, who was brought down into the kitchen by his nurse to
witness it, at the mature age of three years. Tom was the eldest child of his
parents, and from his earliest babyhood exhibited the family characteristics in
great strength. He was a hearty, strong boy from the first, given to fighting
with and escaping from his nurse, and fraternizing with all the village boys,
with whom he made expeditions all round the neighbourhood. And here, in the
quiet old-fashioned country village, under the shadow of the everlasting hills,
Tom Brown was reared, and never left it till he went first to school, when
nearly eight years of age, for in those days change of air twice a year was not
thought absolutely necessary for the health of all her Majesty's lieges.
I have been credibly informed, and am inclined to
believe, that the various boards of directors of railway companies, those
gigantic jobbers and bribers, while quarrelling about everything else, agreed
together some ten years back to buy up the learned profession of medicine, body
and soul. To this end they set apart several millions of money, which they
continually distribute judiciously among the doctors, stipulating only this one
thing, that they shall prescribe change of air to every patient who can pay, or
borrow money to pay, a railway fare, and see their prescription carried out. If
it be not for this, why is it that none of us can be well at home for a year
together? It wasn't so twenty years ago, not a bit of it. The Browns didn't go
out of the country once in five years. A visit to Reading or Abingdon twice a
year, at assizes or quarter sessions, which the Squire made on his horse with a
pair of saddle-bags containing his wardrobe, a stay of a day or two at some
country neighbour's, or an expedition to a county ball or the yeomanry review,
made up the sum of the Brown locomotion in most years. A stray Brown from some
distant county dropped in every now and then; or from Oxford, on grave nag, an
old don, contemporary of the Squire; and were looked upon by the Brown
household and the villagers with the same sort of feeling with which we now
regard a man who has crossed the Rocky Mountains, or launched a boat on the
Great Lake in Central Africa. The White Horse Vale, remember, was traversed by
no great road—nothing but country parish roads, and these very bad. Only one
coach ran there, and this one only from Wantage to London, so that the western
part of the Vale was without regular means of moving on, and certainly didn't
seem to want them. There was the canal, by the way, which supplied the
country-side with coal, and up and down which continually went the long barges,
with the big black men lounging by the side of the horses along the
towing-path, and the women in bright-coloured handkerchiefs standing in the
sterns steering. Standing I say, but you could never see whether they were standing
or sitting, all but their heads and shoulders being out of sight in the cozy
little cabins which occupied some eight feet of the stern, and which Tom Brown
pictured to himself as the most desirable of residences. His nurse told him
that those good-natured-looking women were in the constant habit of enticing
children into the barges, and taking them up to London and selling them, which
Tom wouldn't believe, and which made him resolve as soon as possible to accept
the oft-proffered invitation of these sirens to “young master” to come in and
have a ride. But as yet the nurse was too much for Tom.
Yet why should I, after all, abuse the gadabout
propensities of my countrymen? We are a vagabond nation now, that's certain,
for better for worse. I am a vagabond; I have been away from home no less than
five distinct times in the last year. The Queen sets us the example: we are
moving on from top to bottom. Little dirty Jack, who abides in Clement's Inn
gateway, and blacks my boots for a penny, takes his month's hop-picking every
year as a matter of course. Why shouldn't he? I'm delighted at it. I love
vagabonds, only I prefer poor to rich ones. Couriers and ladies'-maids,
imperials and travelling carriages, are an abomination unto me; I cannot away
with them. But for dirty Jack, and every good fellow who, in the words of the
capital French song, moves about,
“Comme
le limacon,
Portant
tout son bagage,
Ses
meubles, sa maison,”
on his own back, why, good luck to them, and many
a merry roadside adventure, and steaming supper in the chimney corners of
roadside inns, Swiss chalets, Hottentot kraals, or wherever else they like to
go. So, having succeeded in contradicting myself in my first chapter (which
gives me great hopes that you will all go on, and think me a good fellow
notwithstanding my crotchets), I shall here shut up for the present, and
consider my ways; having resolved to “sar' it out,” as we say in the Vale,
“holus bolus” just as it comes, and then you'll probably get the truth out of
me.
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