From the very earliest, therefore, he had, and could have, but one prospect before him, and that was, the prospect of rising above his first condition. To be sure, like Bruce's spider, he afterwards fell sometimes; but then he reflected that rising and falling, like standing up and sitting down, constitute a portion of the lot of every man's life.
It is currently related amongst the good folks of the country-side wherein our hero first saw the light, that while three or four officious neighbourly women were stealing noiselessly about the room, attending to the wants of the sick woman, and while the accoucheur of the parish was inly congratulating himself on having introduced his round five-thousandth child to the troublesome pleasures of this world, young Colin turned from the arms of the nurse who held him, and, as though even then conscious of the obligation conferred upon him by his admission to the stage of life, stretched out his hand towards the astonished surgeon, and in a very audible voice exclaimed, “Thank you, doctor—thank you!”
I do not vouch for the truth of this anecdote; but this I do say,—whether or not he had anything to be thankful for will be seen, much as he himself saw it, during the course of this his own true history.
That he was lucky in opening his eyes, even though in an humble cottage, amidst the scenes that nature spread around him, is certain enough. To be born poor as the spirit of poverty herself, is sufficiently bad; but far worse is it to be thus born in the bottom of some noisome alley of a vast town, where a single ray of sunlight never falls, nor a glimpse of the sky itself is ever caught, beyond what may be afforded by that small dusky section of it which seems to lie like a dirty ceiling on the chimney-tops, and even then cannot be seen, unless (to speak like a geometrician) by raising the face to a horizontal position and the eyes perpendicularly. Fresh air, fields, rivers, clouds, and sunshine, redeem half the miseries of want, and make a happy joyful being of him who, in any other sense, cannot call one single atom of the world his own.
Colin Clink was a native of the village of Bramleigh, about twenty miles west of that city of law and divinity, of sermons and proctors' parchment, the silent city of York.
Some time previous to his birth, his mother had taken a fancy, suggested, very probably, by the powerful pleading of a weak pocket, or, with equal probability, by something else to the full as argumentative, to reside in a small cottage, (as rural landowners are in the habit of terming such residences, though they are known to everybody else as hovels,) altogether by herself; if I except a little girl, of some five or six years of age, who accompanied her in the capacity of embryo housemaid, gruel-maker, and, when strong enough, of nurse to the expected “little stranger.”
For the discharge of the more important and pressing duties incident to her situation, she depended upon one or two of those permanently unemployed old crones, usually to be found in country places, who pass the greater portion of their time in “preserving” themselves, like red herrings or hung beef, over the idle smoke of their own scanty fires, and who, as they are always waiting chances, may be had by asking for at any moment. Their minimum of wages depended upon a small sum of money derived by Mistress Clink, the mother of our hero, from a source which, as she then followed no particular employment, we are compelled to pronounce obscure.
The sagacious reader may perhaps, in the height of his wisdom, marvel how so young a child as one of five or six years of age should be introduced to his notice in the capacity above-mentioned; but the practice is common enough, and may be accounted for, in the way of cause and effect, upon the most modern philosophical principles. Thus:—Great states require great taxes to support them; great taxes produce political extravagance; political extravagance enforces domestic economy; and domestic economy in the lowest class, where misery would seem almost rudely to sever the most endearing ties, now-a-days, demands that every pair of hands, however small, shall labour for the milk that supports them; and every little heart, however light, shall be filled with the pale cares and yearning anxieties which naturally belong only to mature age.
Of such as these was Mistress Clink's diminutive housemaid, Fanny Woodruff.
Brought up amidst hardships from the first day of her existence, through the agency either of the rod, the heavier stick, or of keener hunger, during at least twelve hours out of every twenty-four that passed over her head; she presented, at five years of age, the miniature picture, painted in white and yellow,—for all the carnation had fled from Nature's palette when she drew this mere sketch of incipient woman,—she presented, I repeat, the miniature picture, not of what childhood is, a bright and joyful outburst of fresh life into a new world of strange attractive things—not of that restless inquiring existence, curious after every created object, and happy amidst them all; but of a little, pale, solemn thing, looking as though it had suddenly fallen, heart-checked, upon a world of evil—as though its eyes had looked only upon discouragement, and its hands been stretched in love, only to be repulsed with indifference or with hatred. The picture of a little baby soul, prematurely forced upon the grown-up anxieties of the world, and made almost a woman in demeanour, before she knew half the attractive actions of a child.