A traveller in Central Africa was surprised and carried off by hostile natives, who brought him before their chief. A drum-head court-martial was held, and sentence of death was speedily passed. But while the executioner was making the necessary preparations, the tribe were ransacking his baggage, and one of them with a shout of joy held up an Oxford blazer of the Balliol pattern. The chief saw it, and his grim features relaxed. In excellent English he said—

“Were you at Balliol? So was I: you may go. Good old Jowett!” (Abi in pacem: Jowettii, et nostrum, haud immemor.)

CHAPTER XIII
CHESHIRE

“Then there is the County Palatine.”
Merchant of Venice.

Three profitable years I spent in Norfolk, learning my business, and I became weary of exile. When on my appointment I received my instructions from the Secretary, he said that, looking to my experience gained as Inspector of Returns, it was not necessary that I should serve any further apprenticeship: I “need not take up my headquarters in Norfolk.” This in official language meant that as soon as possible I should be given a district of my own; and in my ignorance of official life I took no thought for the morrow. But, as my third year of expatriation began to draw to a close, it occurred to me that the Secretary was not personally interested in me, and that in the Civil Service, as elsewhere, a man who wants promotion must see that he gets it.

I reminded Sir Francis that I was hungry—not for promotion, but for amotion to less remoteness. He at once admitted my claim, and created a new district for me, the headquarters of which would be King’s Lynn, and the territory West Norfolk and East Cambridgeshire. I remember that Wisbech and Whittlesey were included. I never saw either, but I should class them with Timbuctoo and Borrioboola Gha. My capital had a population of 17,000, and a member of Parliament: the grass grew in the streets, and on Tuesdays the cattle from the Hinterland came to market and ate it down. There was no Grand hotel, and no place where I could lodge; it would be necessary to take a house, and manage it. Matrimony stared me in the face. The greater part of the aforesaid Hinterland was fen district, imprudently reclaimed from the great dismal swamp. I pointed out these drawbacks to the Secretary, and he kindly suggested that I should beguile the tedium of existence by shooting gulls. It might have come to secretary-birds.

In a few weeks Providence intervened. I heard that H.M.I. at Chester wanted, for family reasons, to live near Lynn: would I change? I felt as Clive must have felt when the pistol, which he snapped at his own head, failed to go off. “He burst forth (says Macaulay) into an exclamation that surely he was reserved for something great.” Can it ever at any other time have happened that a man wanted to leave Chester to go to King’s Lynn?

With great difficulty I persuaded Sir Francis that to the Cheshire and Norfolk people it must be a matter of profound indifference whether Gyas or Cloanthus inspected their schools. Granted that Cheshire suffered loss, yet how pleasant to think of the joy of Norfolk. He grudgingly agreed, and in due course it was arranged. On October 1, 1877, I took charge of the Chester district.

We read at times in the history of great men that after some turning-point in their career they “never looked back.” I am not a great man, and in one sense I often looked back. There were many days when I thought of my successor; in winter frostbitten in the fens; in spring shivering in a dogcart, beating up against the east wind, smothered with yellow dust on Roudham Heath; at any time of the year wearily waiting for slow trains at dismal roadside stations: and at such times the old pious ejaculation rose to my lips, “There but for the Grace of God goes poor John Bradford.”

For I had got the best, or at least the most comfortable, district in England. In six months I was relieved of the eastern side of Cheshire, and my limit was a radius of from 10 to 20 miles round Chester. There were eight railway lines centred in the ancient city to carry me about, and on some of the lines trains were frequent. The school inspections had been so craftily arranged that I could spend the winter months in Birkenhead, where all the travelling was done in cabs; the spring in and around Chester, where there were hansom cabs instead of the perilous dogcart; the summer months in the more distant places at the end of my chain; and the autumn in the Wirral peninsula, between the Dee and the Mersey.