Transcribed by Steven Wood from the Keighley Herald (1893).
ADVENTURES and RECOLLECTIONS
of
BILL O’TH HOYLUS END.
told by himself.
CHAPTER I. [1]
[Bill o’th Hoylus End might be termed a local Will-o’th-Wisp. He has been everything by turns, and nothing long. Now, a lean faced lad, “a mere anatomy, a mountebank, a thread bare juggler, a needy, hollow-ey’d, sharp looking wretch;” now acting the pert, bragging youth, telling quaint stories, and up to a thousand raw tricks; now tumbling and adventuring into manhood with yet the oil and fire and force of youth too strong for reason’s sober guidance; and now—well and now—finding the checks of time have begun to grapple him, he looks back upon the past and tells his curious stories o’er again. Verily, as Shakespeare declares in All’s Well, “the web of his life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together;” and through it all there is a kind of history, just as
“There is a history in all men’s lives,
Figuring the nature of the times deceased.”
This son of Mischief, Art and Guile has stooped to many things but to conquer himself and be his own best friend; that is, according to the conception of the ordinary, respectable, get-on folk of the world. He has followed more or less the wild, shifting impulses of his nature—restless and reckless, if aimless and harmless; fickle and passionate, if rebelliously natural; exhausting his youth and manhood in fruitless action, and devoting the moments of reflection to the playful current of the muse’s fancy, forsooth, to the delectation of the more prosaic humanity in this his locality. A life of pleasure was ever his treasure, and he agrees, after experience of life’s fitful dream, that
E’en Pleasure acts a treacherous part,
She charms the scene, but stings the heart,
And while she gulls us of our wealth,
Or that superior pearl, our health,
[Yet, and these are the two lines he substitutes for the melancholy truth of an old poet],
Yet she restores for all the pains,
By giving Merit her exchange.