“There’s been nae luck throughout the lan’
Sin’ fwok mud leyke their betters shene;
The country’s puzzen’d roun’ wi’ preyde;
We’re c’aff and san’ to auld lang seyne.”
_North Country Ballad._
HARD upon a mile from the village before described lived the hero, the
heroine, and herolets of the present story, by names Mr. and Mrs.
Sandboys, their son, Jobby, and their daughter, Elcy. Their home was one
of the two squires’ houses before spoken of as lying at the extremes of
the village. Mr. Christopher, or, as after the old Cumberland fashion he
was called, “Cursty,” Sandboys, was native to the place, and since his
college days of St. Bees, had never been further than Keswick or
Cockermouth, the two great emporia and larders of Buttermere. He had not
missed Keswick Cheese Fair for forty Martinmasses, and had been a
regular attendant at Lanthwaite Green, every September, with his lean
sheep for grazing. Nor did the Monday morning’s market at Cockermouth
ever open without Mr. Christopher Sandboys, but on one day, and that was
when the two bells of Lorton Church tried to tinkle a marriage peal in
honour of his wedding with the heiress of Newlands. A “statesman” by
birth, he possessed some hundred acres of land, with “pasturing” on the
fell side for his sheep; in which he took such pride that the walls of
his “keeping-room,” or, as _we_ should call it, sitting-room, were
covered on one side with printed bills telling how his “lamb-sucked
ewes,” his “Herdwickes” and his “shearling tups” and “gimmers” had
carried off the first and second best prices at Wastdale and at
Deanscale shows. Indeed, it was his continual boast that he grew the
coat he had on his back, and he delighted not only to clothe himself,
but his son Jobby (much to the annoyance of the youth, who sighed for
the gentler graces of kerseymere) in the undyed, or “self-coloured,”
wool of his sheep, known to all the country round as the “Sandboys’
Grey”—in reality a peculiar tint of speckled brown. His winter mornings
were passed in making nets, and in the summer his winter-woven nets were
used to despoil the waters of Buttermere of their trout and char. He
knew little of the world but through the newspapers that reached him,
half-priced, stained with tea, butter, and eggs, from a coffee-shop in
London—and nothing of society but through that ideal distortion given us
in novels, which makes the whole human family appear as a small colony
of penniless angels and wealthy demons. His long evenings were, however,
generally devoted to the perusal of his newspaper, and, living in a
district to which crime was unknown, he became gradually impressed by
reading the long catalogues of robberies and murders that filled his
London weekly and daily sheets, that all out of Cumberland was in a
state of savage barbarism, and that the Metropolis was a very caldron of
wickedness, of which the grosser scum was continually being taken off,
through the medium of the police, to the colonies. In a word, the
bugbear that haunted the innocent mind of poor Mr. Cursty Sandboys was
the wickedness of all the world but Buttermere.
And yet to have looked at the man, one would never suppose that Sandboys
could be nervous about anything. Taller than even the tallest of the
villagers, among whom he had been bred and born, he looked a grand
specimen of the human race in a country where it is by no means uncommon
to see a labouring man with form and features as dignified, and manners
as grave and self-possessed, as the highest bred nobleman in the land.
His complexion still bore traces of the dark Celtic mountain tribe to
which he belonged, but age had silvered his hair, which, with his white
eyebrows and whiskers, contrasted strongly and almost beautifully with a
small “cwoal-black een.” So commanding, indeed, was his whole
appearance, though in his suit of homespun grey, that, on first
acquaintance, the exceeding simplicity of his nature came upon those who
were strangers to the man and the place with a pleasant surprise.
Suspicious as he was theoretically, and convinced of the utter evil of
the ways of the world without Buttermere, still, practically, Cursty
Sandboys was the easy dupe of many a tramp and Turnpike Sailor, that
with long tales of intricate and accumulative distress, supported by
apocryphal briefs and petitions, signed and attested by “phantasm”
mayors and magistrates, sought out the fastnesses of Buttermere, to prey
upon the innocence and hospitality of its people.[3]
Footnote 3:
To prove to the reader how systematic and professional is the vagrancy
and trading beggary of this county, a gentleman, living in the
neighbourhood of Buttermere, and to whom we are indebted for many
other favours, has obliged us with the subjoined registry and analysis
of the vagabonds who sought relief at his house, from April 1, 1848,
to March 31, 1849:—
Males (strangers) 80
Males (previously 73
relieved)
Females (strangers) 10
Females (previously 41
relieved)
──
Total 204
This is at the rate of two beggars a week, for the colder six months
in the year, and six a week in the warm weather, visiting as remote,
secluded, and humble a village as any in the kingdom. It is curious to
note in the above the great number of females “previously relieved”
compared with the “strangers,” as showing that when women take to
vagrancy they seldom abandon the trade. It were to be desired that
gentlemen would perform similar services to the above in their several
parts of the kingdom, so that, by a large collection of facts, the
public might be at last convinced how pernicious to a community is
promiscuous charity. Of all lessons there is none so dangerous as to
teach people that they can live by other means than labour.
It was Mr. Sandboys’ special delight, of an evening, to read the
newspaper aloud to his family, and endeavour to impress his wife and
children with the same sense of the rascality of the outer world as
reigned within his own bosom. But his denunciations, as is too often the
case, served chiefly to draw attention and to excite curiosity touching
subjects, which, without them, would probably have remained unheard of:
so that his family, unknown to each other, were secretly sighing for
that propitious turn of destiny which should impel them where fashion
and amusement never failed, as their father said, to lure their victim
from more serious pursuits.
The mind of Mrs. Sandboys was almost as circumscribed as that of the
good Cursty himself. If Sandboys loved his country, and its mountains,
she was lost in her kitchen, her beds, and her buckbasket. His soul was
hemmed in by “the Hay-Stacks,” Red Pike, Melbrake, and Grassmoor; and
hers, by the four walls of Hassness house. She prided herself on her
puddings, and did not hesitate to take her stand upon her piecrust. She
had often been heard to say, with extreme satisfaction, that her
“Buttered sops” were the admiration of the country round—and it was her
boast that she could turn the large thin oat-cake at a toss; while the
only feud she had ever been known to have in all her life, was with Mrs.
Gill, of Low-Houses, Newlands, who declared that in her opinion the
cakes were better made with two “backbwords” than one; and though
several attempts had been made towards reconciliation, she had ever
since withstood all advances towards a renewal of the ancient friendship
that had cemented the two families. It was her glory that certain
receipts had been in her family—the heirlooms of the eldest daughter—for
many generations; and, when roused on the subject, she had been heard to
exclaim, that she would not part with her wild raspberry jelly but with
her life; and, come what may, she had made up her mind, to carry her
“sugared curds” down with her to her grave.
The peculiar feature of Mrs. Sandboys’ mind was to magnify the mildest
trifles into violent catastrophes. If a China shepherdess, or porcelain
Prince Albert, were broken, she took it almost as much to heart as if a
baby had been killed. Washing, to her, was almost a sacred ceremony, the
day being invariably accompanied with fasts. Her beds were white as the
opposite waters of “Sour Milk Gill;” and the brightness of the brass
hobs in the keeping-room at Hassness were brilliant tablets to record
her domestic virtues. She was perpetually waging war with cobwebs, and,
though naturally of a strong turn of mind, the only time she had been
known to faint was, when the only flea ever seen in Hassness House made
its appearance full in the front of Cursty Sandboys’ shirt, at his
dinner, for the celebration of a Sheep-Shearing Prize. If her husband
dreaded visiting London on account of its iniquities, she was deterred
by the Cumberland legend of its bugs—for, to her rural mind, the people
of the Great Metropolis seemed to be as much preyed upon by these
vermin, as the natives of India by the white ants—and it was a
conviction firmly implanted in her bosom, that if she once trusted
herself in a London four-post, there would be nothing left of her in the
morning but her nightcap.
The son and daughter of this hopeful pair were mere common-place
creatures. The boy, Jobby, as Joseph is familiarly called in Cumberland,
had just shot up into hobbledehoyhood, and was long and thin, as if
Nature had drawn him, like a telescope, out of his boots. Though almost
a man in stature, he was still a boy in tastes, and full of life and
activity—ever, to his mother’s horror, tearing his clothes in climbing
the craigs for starlings and magpies, or ransacking the hedges for
“spinks” and “skopps;” or else he terrified her by remaining out on the
lake long past dusk, in a boat, or delighting to go up into the fells
after the sheep, when overblown by the winter’s snow. His mother
declared, after the ancient maternal fashion, that it was impossible to
keep that boy clean, and however he wore out his clothes and shoes was
more than she could tell. The pockets of the youth—of which she
occasionally insisted on seeing the contents—will best show his
character to the discerning reader; these usually proved to comprise
gentles, oat-cake, a leather sucker, percussion caps, a short pipe,
(for, truth to say, the youth was studying this great art of modern
manhood), a few remaining blaeberries, a Jew’s-harp, a lump of cobbler’s
wax, a small coil of shining gut, with fish-hooks at the end, a charge
or two of shot, the Cumberland Songster, a many-bladed knife with
cork-screw, horsepicker, and saw at the back, together with a small mass
of paste, swarming with thin red worms, tied up in one of his sister’s
best cambric pocket-handkerchiefs.
Elcy, or Alice Sandboys, the sister of the last-named young gentleman,
was some two or three years his elder; and, taking after her mother, had
rather more of the Saxon complexion than her father or brother. At that
age when the affections seek for something to rest themselves upon, and
located where society afforded no fitting object for her sympathies, her
girlish bosom found relief in expending its tenderness on pet doves, and
squirrels, and magpies, and such gentler creatures as were denizens of
her father’s woods. These, and all other animals, she spoke of in
diminutive endearment; no matter what the size, all animals were little
to her; for, in her own language, her domestic menagerie consisted of
her dovey, her doggey, her dickey, her pussey, her scuggy, her piggey,
and her cowey. In her extreme love for the animal creation, she would
have taken the young trout from its play and liberty in the broad lake
beside her, and kept it for ever circling round the crystal treadmill of
a glass globe. But the course of her true love ran anything but smooth.
Jobby was continually slitting the tongue of her magpie with a silver
sixpence, to increase its powers of language, or angling for her gold
fish with an elaborate apparatus of hooks, or carrying off her favourite
spaniel to have his ears and tail cut in the last new fashion, at the
farrier’s, or setting her cat on a board down the lake, or performing a
hundred other such freaks as thoughtless youth alone can think of, to
the annoyance of susceptible maidens. Herself unaware of the pleasures
of which she deprived the animals she caged and globed, and on which her
sole anxiety was to heap every kindness, she was continually
remonstrating with her brother (we regret to say with little effect) as
to the wickedness of fishing, or, indeed, of putting anything to pain.
Such was the character of the family located at Hassness House,—the only
residence that animated the solitary banks of Buttermere—and such
doubtless would the Sandboys have ever remained but for the advent of
the year 1851. The news of the opening of the Great Exhibition had
already penetrated the fastnesses of Buttermere, and the villagers, who
perhaps, but for the notion that the whole world was about to treat
itself to a trip to the metropolis, would have remained quiet in their
mountain homes, had been, for months past, subscribing their pennies
with the intention of having their share in the general holiday.
Buttermere was one universal scene of excitement from Woodhouse to
Gatesgarth. Mrs. Nelson was making a double allowance of her excellent
oat-cakes; Mrs. Clark, of the Fish Inn, was packing up a jar of sugared
butter, among other creature comforts for the occasion. John Cowman was
brushing up his top-shirt; Dan Fleming was greasing his calkered boots;
John Lancaster was wondering whether his hat were good enough for the
great show; all the old dames were busy ironing their deep-frilled caps,
and airing their hoods; all the young lasses were stitching at all their
dresses, while some of the more nervous villagers, who had never yet
trusted themselves to a railway, were secretly making their
wills—preparatory to their grand starting for the metropolis.
Amidst this general bustle and excitement there was, however, one house
where the master was not absorbed in a calculation as to the probable
length and expenses of the journey; where the mistress was not busy
preparing for the comfort of the outward and inward man of her lord and
master; where the daughter was not in deep consultation as to the
prevailing metropolitan fashions—and this house was Hassness. For Mr.
Sandboys, with his long-cherished conviction of the wickedness of
London, had expressed in unmeasured terms his positive determination
that neither he himself, nor any that belonged to him, should ever be
exposed to the moral pollution of the metropolis. This was a sentiment
in which Mrs. Sandboys heartily concurred, though on very different
grounds—the one objecting to the moral, the other to the physical,
contamination of the crowded city. Mr. Sandboys had been thrice
solicited to join the Buttermere Travelling Club, and thrice he had held
out against the most persuasive appeals. But Squire Jopson, who acted as
Treasurer to the Travelling Association for the Great Exhibition of
1851, not liking that his old friend Sandboys should be the only one in
all Buttermere who absented himself from the general visit to the
metropolis, waited upon him at Hassness, to offer him the last chance of
availing himself of the advantages of that valuable institution as a
means of conveying himself and family, at the smallest possible expense,
to the great metropolis, and of allowing him and them a week’s stay, as
well as the privilege of participating in all the amusements and
gaieties of the capital at its gayest possible time.
It was a severe trial for Sandboys to withstand the united batteries of
Jopson’s enthusiastic advocacy, his daughter’s entreaties, his son’s
assurances of steadiness. But Sandboys, though naturally possessed of a
heart of butter, delighted to assure himself that he carried about a
flint in his bosom; so he told Jopson, with a shake of his head, that he
might as well try to move Helvellyn or shake Skiddaw; and that, while he
blushed for the weakness of his family, he thanked Heaven that he, at
least, was adamant.
Jopson showed him by the list he brought with him that the whole of the
villagers were going, and that Hassness would be left neighbourless for
a circuit of seven miles at least; whereupon Sandboys observed with a
chuckle, that the place could not be much more quiet than it was, and
that with those fine fellows, Robinson and Davy Top, and Dod and
Honister around him, he should never want company.
Jopson talked sagely of youths seeing the world and expanding their
minds by travel; whereat the eyes of the younger Sandboys glistened; but
the father rejoined, that travel was of use only for the natural
beauties of the scenery it revealed, and the virtues of the people with
whom it brought the traveller into association; “and where,” he asked,
with evident pride of county, “could more natural beauty or greater
native virtue be found, than amongst the mountains and the pastoral race
of Buttermere?” Seizing the latest _Times_ that had reached him the
evening before, he pointed triumphantly to some paragraph, headed
“Ingenious Fraud on a Yokel!” wherein a country gentleman had been
cleverly duped of some hundreds of pounds paid to him that morning at
Smithfield; and he asked with sarcasm, whether those were the scenes and
those the people that Jopson thought he could improve his son Jobby by
introducing him to?
In vain Jopson pulled from his pocket a counter newspaper, and showed
him the plan of some Monster Lodging House which was to afford
accommodation for one thousand persons from the country at one and the
same time, “for one-and-three per night!”—how, for this small sum, each
of the thousand was to be provided “with bedstead, good wool mattress,
sheets, blankets, and coverlet; with soap, towels, and every
accommodation for ablution;”—how the two thousand boots of the thousand
lodgers were to be cleaned at one penny per pair, and their one thousand
chins to be shaven by relays of barbers continually in attendance—how a
surgeon was “to attend at nine o’clock every morning,” to examine the
lodgers, and “instantly remove all cases of infectious disease”—how
there was to be “a smoking-room, detached from the main-building, where
a band of music was to play every evening, gratis”—how omnibuses to all
the theatres and amusements and sights were to carry the thousand
sight-seers at one penny per head—how “cold roast and boiled beef and
mutton, and ditto ditto sausages and bacon, and pickles, salads, and
fruit pies (when to be procured), were to be furnished, at fixed
prices,” to the thousand country gentlemen with the thousand country
appetites—how “all the dormitories were to be well lighted with gas to
secure the complete privacy of the occupants”—how “they were to be
watched over by efficient wardens and police constables”—how “an office
was to be opened for the security of luggage”—and how “the proprietor
pledged himself that every care should be taken to ensure the comfort,
convenience, and _strict discipline_ of so large a body.”
Sandboys, who had sat perfectly quiet while Jobson was detailing the
several advantages of this Brobdignagian boarding-house, burst out at
the completion of the narrative with a demand to be informed whether it
was probable that he, who had passed his whole life in a village
consisting of fifteen houses and but seven families, would, in his
fifty-fifth year, consent to take up his abode with a thousand people
under one roof, with a gas-light to secure the privacy of his bed-room,
policemen to watch him all night, and a surgeon to examine him in the
morning!
Having thus delivered himself, he turned round, with satisfaction, to
appeal to his wife and children, when he found them, to his horror, with
the newspaper in their hands, busily admiring the picture of the very
building that he had so forcibly denounced.
Early the next morning, Mrs. Sandboys, with Jobby and Elcy, went down to
the Fish Inn, to see the dozen carts and cars leave, with the united
villagers of Buttermere, for the “Travellers’ Train” at Cockermouth.
There was the stalwart Daniel Fleming, of the White Howe, mounted on his
horse, with his wife, her baby in her arms, and the children, with the
farm maid, in the cart,—his two men trudging by its side. There was John
Clark, of Wilkinsyke, the farmer and statesman, with his black-haired
sons, Isaac and Johnny, while Richard rode the piebald pony; and Joseph
and his wife, with little Grace, and their rosy-cheeked maid, Susannah,
from the Fish Inn, sat in the car, kept at other times for the
accommodation of their visitors. After them came Isaac Cowman, of the
Croft, the red-faced farmer-constable, with his fine tall, flaxen, Saxon
family about him; and, following in his wake, his Roman-nosed nephew
John, the host of “The Victoria,” with his brisk, bustling wife on his
arm. Then came handsome old John Lancaster, seventy years of age, and as
straight as the mountain larch, with his wife and his sons, Andrew and
Robert, and their wives. And following these, John Branthwaite, of
Bowtherbeck, the parish-clerk, with his wife and wife’s mother; and
Edward Nelson, the sheep-breeder, of Gatesgarth, dressed in his
well-known suit of grey, with his buxom gudewife, and her three boys and
her two girls by her side; while the fresh-coloured bonnie lassie, her
maid, Betty Gatesgarth, of Gatesgarth, in her bright green dress and
pink ribbons, strutted along in their wake. Then came the Riggs’: James
Rigg, the miner, of Scots Tuft, who had come over from his work at
Cleator for the special holiday; and there were his wife and young boys,
and Jane Rigg, the widow, and her daughter Mary Ann, the grey-eyed
beauty of Buttermere, in her jaunty jacket-waisted dress; with her
swarthy black-whiskered Celtic brother, and his pleasant-faced Saxon
wife carrying their chubby-cheeked child; and behind them came Ann Rigg,
the slater’s widow, from Craig House, with her boys and little girl;
and, leaning on their shoulders, the eighty-years old, white-haired
Braithwaite Rigg and his venerable dame; and close upon them was seen
old Rowley Lightfoot, his wife, and son John. Squire Jobson’s man walked
beside the car from the Fish Inn, talking to the tidy, clean old
housekeeper of Woodhouse; while the Squire himself rode in the rear,
proud and happy as he marshalled the merry little band along;—for, truth
to say, it would have been difficult to find in any other part of
England so much manliness and so much rustic beauty centred in so small
a spot.
As they moved gently along the road, John Cowman, the host of the
Victoria, struck up the following well-known song, which was welcomed
with a shout from the whole “lating”—
“I’s Borrowdale Jwohnny, just cumt up to Lunnon,
Nay, gurn nit at _me_, for fear _I_ laugh at _you_;
I’ve seen kneaves donn’d i’ silks, and gud men gang in tatters;
The truth we sud tell, and gi’e auld Nick his due.”
Then the gust rushed down the valley, and the voices of the happy
holiday throng were swept, for a moment, away; as it lulled again, the
ear, familiar to the song, could catch the laugh and cheers that
accompanied the next verse:—
“‘Keep frae’t lasses, and ne’er look ahint thee.’
‘We’re deep as the best o’ them, fadder,’ says I.
They packed up ae sark, Sunday weascwoat, twee neckcloths,
Wot bannock, cauld dumplin’, and top stannin’ pye;”
Again the voices were lost in the turning of the road, and presently, as
they shot out once more, they might be heard singing in full chorus—
“Ca’ and see cousin Jacep, he’s got a’ the money;
He’ll get thee some guver’ment pleace to be seer.”
At last, all was still—but scarcely more still than when the whole of
the cottages were filled with their little families, for the village,
though now utterly deserted, would have seemed to the stranger to have
been as thickly populated and busy as ever.
------------------------------------------------------------------------