‘As is the custom in travelling with trained horses, we set off early,
and walked without hurry. When we stopped to breakfast, the plenty of
excellent cold beef, bread and cheese, with the best table-beer, and as
much as we pleased, gave me a foretaste of the fortunate change I had
made. This indeed exceeded my utmost expectations,—I was entering upon a
new existence,—was delighted, full of hope, and cheerful alacrity, yet
too timid to be presumptuous. Clarke, being a good-tempered lad, and
seeing me happy, attempted to play me no tricks whatever. On the
contrary, he gave me all the caution and advice he could, to guard me
against being drawn into the common-place deceptions, most of them
nasty, many of them unhealthy, and all of them tending to make the poor
tyro, a common laughing-stock, uniformly practised by the resident boys,
upon every new comer. I do not recollect one-half these tricks: but that
with which they begin, if I do not mistake, is to persuade their victim,
that the first thing necessary for a well-trained stable-boy, is to
borrow as many waistcoats as he can, and in the morning after he has
dressed and fed his horse, to put them all on, take a race of perhaps
two or three miles, return home, strip himself stark naked, and
immediately be covered up in the hot dung-hill; which, they assure him,
is the method the grooms take when they sweat themselves down to ride a
race. Should the poor fellow follow their directions, they conclude the
joke with pail-fulls of cold water, which stand ready, to throw over
him.
‘Another of their diversions used to be that of hunting the owl, which
is already very whimsically described in a book of much humour, and
tolerably well-known, called Tim Bobbin’s Lancashire dialect. To catch
the owl, is to persuade a booby that there is an owl found at roost in
the corner of a barn; that a ladder must be placed against a hole,
through which, when the persons within shall be pleased to hoot and hunt
him, he must necessarily fly, as the barn door is shut, and every other
outlet closed: that the boy chosen to catch the owl must mount this
ladder on the outside, and the purblind animal, they say, will fly
directly into his hat. When the owl-catcher is persuaded to all this,
and mounts to his post, the game begins: hallooing and absurd noises are
made; the fellows within divert themselves with laughing at what is to
come, and pretending to call to one another to drive the owl from this
place to that; while two or three of them approach nearer and nearer to
the hole, when they discharge the contents of their full tubs and pails
on the head of the expecting owl-catcher, who is generally precipitated
from his ladder to some soft, but not very agreeable preparation below.
‘Clarke warned me against several other of the games at which I should
be invited to play; in most of which there was some whim, but a great
deal more of that dirty wit in which ill-bred boys are known to delight.
Clarke, however, did me this essential service, that he not only taught
me to avoid all the snares he mentioned, but rendered me so wary, that
all the time I was among this mischievous crew, I was never once
entrapped by them. At this they occasionally expressed great wonder;
perhaps, had they known the secret, they would have taken their revenge
on Clarke.
‘The weather through the whole of our journey was fine, the ride highly
agreeable, and the instruction and information I received from Clarke,
made it still more pleasant to me. The only place I can distinctly
remember having passed through and made a short stay at, was Huntingdon.