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TOM BROWN'S SCHOOLDAYS CHAPTER I - THE BROWN FAMILY "I'm
the Poet of White Horse Vale, sir, With liberal notions under my cap." - BalladThe 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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