Now the worst was over, and my mother was the most heroic of us all. So
I began to prepare myself in good earnest, and I followed Trevanion's
instructions with a perseverance which I could never, at that young day,
have thrown into the dead life of books. I was in a good school,
amongst our Cumberland sheep-walks, to learn those simple elements of
rural art which belong to the pastoral state. Mr. Sidney, in his
admirable "Australian Hand-Book," recommends young gentlemen who think
of becoming settlers in the Bush to bivouac for three months on
Salisbury Plain. That book was not then written, or I might have taken
the advice; meanwhile I think, with due respect to such authority, that
I went through a preparatory training quite as useful in seasoning the
future emigrant. I associated readily with the kindly peasants and
craftsmen, who became my teachers. With what pride I presented my
father with a desk, and my mother with a work-box, fashioned by my own
hands! I made Bolt a lock for his plate-chest, and (that last was my
magnum opus, my great masterpiece) I repaired and absolutely set going
an old turret-clock in the tower that had stood at 2 p.m. since the
memory of man. I loved to think, each time the hour sounded, that those
who heard its deep chime would remember me. But the flocks were my main
care. The sheep that I tended and helped to shear, and the lamb that I
hooked out of the great marsh, and the three venerable ewes that I
nursed through a mysterious sort of murrain which puzzled all the
neighborhood,--are they not written in thy loving chronicles, O House of
Caxton?
And now, since much of the success of my experiment must depend on the
friendly terms I could establish with my intended partner, I wrote to
Trevanion, begging him to get the young gentleman who was to join me,
and whose capital I was to administer, to come and visit us. Trevanion
complied; and there arrived a tall fellow, somewhat more than six feet
high, answering to the name of Guy Bolding, in a cut-away sporting-coat,
with a dog whistle tied to the button-hole, drab shorts and gaiters, and
a waistcoat with all manner of strange furtive pockets. Guy Bolding had
lived a year and a half at Oxford as a "fast man,"--so "fast" had he
lived that there was scarcely a tradesman at Oxford into whose books he
had not contrived to run.
His father was compelled to withdraw him from the University, at which
he had already had the honor of being plucked for "the little-go;" and
the young gentleman, on being asked for what profession he was fit, had
replied, with conscious pride, that he could "tool a coach!" In
despair, the sire, who owed his living to Trevanion, had asked the
states man's advice; and the advice had fixed me with a partner in
expatriation.
My first feeling in greeting the "fast" man was certainly that of deep
disappointment and strong repugnance. But I was determined not to be
too fastidious; and, having a lucky knack of suiting myself pretty well
to all tempers (without which a man had better not think of loadstones
in the Great Australasian Bight), I contrived before the first week was
out to establish so many points of connection between us that we became
the best friends in the world. Indeed, it would have been my fault if
we had not; for Guy Bolding, with all his faults, was one of those
excellent creatures who are nobody's enemies but their own. His good-
humor was inexhaustible. Not a hardship or privation came amiss to him.
He had a phrase, "Such fun!" that always rushed laughingly to his lips
when another man would have cursed and groaned. If we lost our way in
the great trackless moors, missed our dinner, and were half-famished,
Guy rubbed hands that would have felled an ox, and chuckled out, "Such
fun!" If we stuck in a bog, if we were caught in a thunder-storm, if we
were pitched head-over-heels by the wild colts we undertook to break in,
Guy Bolding's sole elegy was "Such fun!" That grand shibboleth of
philosophy only forsook him at the sight of an open book. I don't think
that at that time he could have found "fun" even in Don Quixote. This
hilarious temperament had no insensibility; a kinder heart never beat,--
but, to be sure, it beat to a strange, restless, tarantula sort of
measure, which kept it in a perpetual dance. It made him one of those
officiously good fellows who are never quiet themselves, and never let
any one else be quiet if they can help it. But Guy's great fault, in
this prudent world, was his absolute incontinence of money. If you had
turned a Euphrates of gold into his pockets at morning, it would have
been as dry as the Great Sahara by twelve at noon. What he did with the
money was a mystery as much to himself as to every one else. His father
said, in a letter to me, that "he had seen him shying at sparrows with
half-crowns!" That such a young man could come to no good in England,
seemed perfectly clear.
Still, it is recorded of many great men, who did not end their days in a
workhouse, that they were equally non-retentive of money. Schiller,
when he had nothing else to give away, gave the clothes from his back,
and Goldsmith the blankets from his bed. Tender hands found it
necessary to pick Beethoven's pockets at home before he walked out.
Great heroes, who have made no scruple of robbing the whole world, have
been just as lavish as poor poets and musicians. Alexander, in
parcelling out his spoils, left himself "hope"! And as for Julius
Caesar, he was two millions in debt when he shied his last half-crown at
the sparrows in Gaul. Encouraged by these illustrious examples, I had
hopes of Guy Bolding; and the more as he was so aware of his own
infirmity that he was perfectly contented with the arrangement which
made me treasurer of his capital, and even besought me, on no account,
let him beg ever so hard, to permit his own money to come in his own
way. In fact, I contrived to gain a great ascendency over his simple,
generous, thoughtless nature; and by artful appeals to his affections,--
to all he owed to his father for many bootless sacrifices, and to the
duty of providing a little dower for his infant sister, whose meditated
portion had half gone to pay his college debts,--I at last succeeded in
fixing into his mind an object to save for.
Three other companions did I select for our Cleruchia. The first was
the son of our old shepherd, who had lately married, but was not yet
encumbered with children,--a good shepherd, and an intelligent, steady
fellow. The second was a very different character. He had been the
dread of the whole squirearchy. A more bold and dexterous poacher did
not exist. Now my acquaintance with this latter person, named Will
Peterson, and more popularly "Will o' the Wisp," had commenced thus:
Bolt had managed to rear, in a small copse about a mile from the house,
--and which was the only bit of ground in my uncle's domains that might
by courtesy be called "a wood,"--a young colony of pheasants, that he
dignified by the title of a "preserve." This colony was audaciously
despoiled and grievously depopulated, in spite of two watchers, who,
with Bolt, guarded for seven nights successively the slumbers of the
infant settlement. So insolent was the assault that bang, bang! went
the felonious gun,--behind, before, within but a few yards of the
sentinels,--and the gunner was off and the prey seized, before they
could rush to the spot. The boldness and skill of the enemy soon
proclaimed him, to the experienced watchers, to be Will o' the Wisp; and
so great was their dread of this fellow's strength and courage, and so
complete their despair of being a match for his swiftness and cunning,
that after the seventh night the watchers refused to go out any longer;
and poor Bolt himself was confined to his bed by an attack of what a
doctor would have called rheumatism, and a moralist, rage. My
indignation and sympathy were greatly excited by this mortifying
failure, and my interest romantically aroused by the anecdotes I had
heard of Will o' the Wisp; accordingly, armed with a thick bludgeon, I
stole out at night, and took my way to the copse. The leaves were not
off the trees, and how the poacher contrived to see his victims I know
not; but five shots did he fire, and not in vain, without allowing me to
catch a glimpse of him. I then retreated to the outskirt of the copse,
and waited patiently by an angle which commanded two sides of the wood.
Just as the dawn began to peep, I saw my roan emerge within twenty yards
of me. I held my breath, suffered him to get a few steps from the wood,
crept on so as to intercept his retreat, and then pounce--such a bound!
My hand was on his shoulder,--prr, prr; no eel was ever more lubricate.
He slid from me like a thing immaterial, and was off over the moors with
a swiftness which might well have baffled any clodhopper,--a race whose
calves are generally absorbed in the soles of their hobnail shoes. But
the Hellenic Institute, with its classical gymnasia, had trained its
pupils in all bodily exercises; and though the Will o' the Wisp was
swift for a clodhopper, he was no match at running for any youth who has
spent his boyhood in the discipline of cricket, prisoner's bar, and
hunt-the-hare. I reached him at length, and brought him to bay.
"Stand back!" said he, panting, and taking aim with his gun: "it is
loaded."
"Yes," said I; "but though you're a brave poacher, you dare not fire at
your fellow-man. Give up the gun this instant."
My address took him by surprise; he did not fire. I struck up the
barrel, and closed on him. We grappled pretty tightly, and in the
wrestle the gun went off. The man loosened his hold. "Lord ha' mercy!
I have not hurt you?" he said falteringly.
"My good fellow,--no," said I; "and now let us throw aside gun and
bludgeon, and fight it out like Englishmen, or else let us sit down and
talk it over like friends."
The Will o' the Wisp scratched its head and laughed.
"Well, you're a queer one!" quoth it. And the poacher dropped the gun
and sat down.
We did talk it over, and I obtained Peterson's promise to respect the
preserve henceforth; and we thereon grew so cordial that he walked home
with me, and even presented me, shyly and apologetically, with the five
pheasants he had shot. From that time I sought him out. He was a young
fellow not four and twenty, who had taken to poaching from the wild
sport of the thing, and from some confused notions that he had a license
from Nature to poach. I soon found out that he was meant for better
things than to spend six months of the twelve in prison, and finish his
life on the gallows after killing a gamekeeper. That seemed to me his
most probable destiny in the Old World, so I talked him into a burning
desire for the New one; and a most valuable aid in the Bush he proved
too.
My third selection was in a personage who could bring little physical
strength to help us, but who had more mind (though with a wrong twist in
it) than both the others put together.
A worthy couple in the village had a son, who, being slight and puny,
compared to the Cumberland breed, was shouldered out of the market of
agricultural labor, and went off, yet a boy, to a manufacturing town.
Now about the age of thirty, this mechanic, disabled for his work by a
long illness, came home to recover; and in a short time we heard of
nothing but the pestilential doctrines with which he was either shocking
or infecting our primitive villagers. According to report, Corcyra
itself never engendered a democrat more awful. The poor man was really
very ill, and his parents very poor; but his unfortunate doctrines dried
up all the streams of charity that usually flowed through our kindly
hamlet. The clergyman (an excellent man, but of the old school) walked
by the house as if it were tabooed. The apothecary said, "Miles Square
ought to have wine;" but he did not send him any. The farmers held his
name in execration, for he had incited all their laborers to strike for
another shilling a week. And but for the old Tower, Miles Square would
soon have found his way to the only republic in which he could obtain
that democratic fraternization for which he sighed; the grave being, I
suspect, the sole commonwealth which attains that dead flat of social
equality that life in its every principle so heartily abhors.
My uncle went to see Miles Square, and came back the color of purple.
Miles Square had preached him a long sermon on the unholiness of war.
"Even in defence of your king and country!" had roared the Captain; and
Miles Square had replied with a remark upon kings in general that the
Captain could not have repeated without expecting to see the old Tower
fall about his ears, and with an observation about the country in
particular, to the effect that "the country would be much better off if
it were conquered!" On hearing the report of these loyal and patriotic
replies, my father said "Papoe!" and roused out of his usual
philosophical indifference, went himself to visit Miles Square. My
father returned as pale as my uncle had been purple. "And to think,"
said he mournfully, "that in the town whence this man comes there are,
he tells me, ten thousand other of God's creatures who speed the work of
civilization while execrating its laws!"
But neither father nor uncle made any opposition when, with a basket
laden with wine and arrowroot, and a neat little Bible bound in brown,
my mother took her way to the excommunicated cottage. Her visit was as
signal a failure as those that preceded it. Miles Square refused the
basket,--"he was not going to accept alms and eat the bread of charity;"
and on my mother meekly suggesting that "if Mr. Miles Square would
condescend to look into the Bible, he would see that even charity was no
sin in giver or recipient," Mr. Miles Square had undertaken to prove
"that, according to the Bible, he had as much a right to my mother's
property as she had; that all things should be in common; and when all
things were in common, what became of charity? No, he could not eat my
uncle's arrowroot and drink his wine while my uncle was improperly
withholding from him and his fellow-creatures so many unprofitable
acres: the land belonged to the people." It was now the turn of
Pisistratus to go. He went once, and he went often. Miles Square and
Pisistratus wrangled and argued, argued and wrangled, and ended by
taking a fancy to each other; for this poor Miles Square was not half so
bad as his doctrines. His errors arose from intense sympathy with the
sufferings he had witnessed amidst the misery which accompanies the
reign of millocratism, and from the vague aspirations of a half-taught,
impassioned, earnest nature. By degrees I persuaded him to drink the
wine and eat the arrowroot en attendant that millennium which was to
restore the land to the people. And then my mother came again and
softened his heart, and for the first time in his life let into its cold
crotchets the warm light of human gratitude. I lent him some books,
amongst others a few volumes on Australia. A passage in one of the
latter, in which it was said "that an intelligent mechanic usually made
his way in the colony, even as a shepherd, better than a dull
agricultural laborer," caught hold of his fancy and seduced his
aspirations into a healthful direction. Finally, as he recovered, he
entreated me to let him accompany me. And as I may not have to return
to Miles Square, I think it right here to state that he did go with me
to Australia, and did succeed, first as a shepherd, next as a
superintendent, and finally, on saving money, as a landowner; and that
in spite of his opinions of the unholiness of war, he was no sooner in
possession of a comfortable log homestead than he defended it with
uncommon gallantry against an attack of the aborigines, whose right to
the soil was, to say the least of it, as good as his claim to my uncle's
acres; that he commemorated his subsequent acquisition of a fresh
allotment, with the stock on it, by a little pamphlet, published at
Sydney, on the "Sanctity of the Rights of Property;" and that when I
left the colony, having been much pestered by two refractory "helps"
that he had added to his establishment, he had just distinguished
himself by a very anti-levelling lecture upon the duties of servants to
their employers. What would the Old World have done for this man?