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]]
[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 relieved) | 73 |
| Females (strangers) | 10 |
| Females (previously relieved) | 41 |
| ── | |
| 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.