From the moment, postponed as long as possible in such establishments, in which he doffed the petticoat—a moment, by the way, in which the obstinate and masterful spirit of the ungentle sex often begins to show itself in nurseries of a far more polished description;—from that moment may Jesse's wanderings be said to commence. Disobedience lurked in the habit masculine. The wilful urchin stood, like some dandy apprentice, contemplating his brown sturdy legs, as they stuck out from his new trowsers, already (such was the economy of the tailor employed on the occasion) "a world too short," and the first use he made of those useful supporters was to run away. So little did any one really care for the poor child, that not being missed till night-fall, or sought after till the next morning, he had strayed far enough, when, at last picked up, and identified by the parish mark on his new jacket, to be half frozen, (it was mid-winter when his first elopement happened,) half-starved, half-drowned, and more than half-dead of fatigue and exhaustion. "It will be a lesson!" said the moralising matron of the workhouse, as, after a sound scolding, she fed the little culprit and put him to bed. "It will be a lesson to the rover!" And so it proved; for, after being recruited by a few days' nursing, he again ran away, in a different direction.
When recovered the second time, he was whipped as well as fed—another lesson which only made the stubborn recusant run the faster. Then, upon his next return, they shut him up in a dark den appropriately called the black-hole, a restraint which, of course, increased his zest for light and liberty, and in the first moment of freedom—a moment greatly accelerated by his own strenuous efforts in the shape of squalling, bawling, roaring, and stamping, unparalleled and insupportable, even in that mansion of din—in the very instant of freedom he was off again; he ran away from work; he ran away from school; certain to be immersed in his dismal dungeon as soon as he could be recaught; so that his whole childhood became a series of alternate imprisonments and escapes.
That he should be so often lost was, considering his propensities and the proverbial cunning of his caste, not, perhaps, very remarkable. But the number of times and the variety of ways, in which, in spite of the little trouble taken in searching for him, he was sent back to the place from whence he came, was really something wonderful. If any creature in the world had cared a straw for the poor child, he must have been lost over and over: nobody did care for him, and he was as sure to turn up as a bad guinea. He has been cried like Found Goods in Belford Market: advertised like a strayed donkey in the H——shire Courant; put for safe keeping into compters, cages, roundhouses, and bridewells: passed, by different constables, through half the parishes in the county; and so frequently and minutely described in handbills and the Hue and Cry, that by the time he was twelve years old, his stature, features, and complexion were as well known to the rural police as those of some great state criminal. In a word, "the lad would live;" and the Aberleigh overseers, who would doubtless have been far from inconsolable if they had never happened to hear of him again, were reluctantly obliged to make the best of their bargain.
Accordingly, they placed him as a sort of boy of all-work at "the shop" at Hinton, where he remained, upon an accurate computation, somewhere about seven hours; they then put him with a butcher at Langley, where he staid about five hours and a-half, arriving at dusk, and escaping before midnight: then with a baker at Belford, in which good town he sojourned the (for him) unusual space of two nights and a day; and then they apprenticed him to Master Samuel Goddard, an eminent dealer in cattle leaving his new master to punish him according to law, provided he should run away again. Run away of course he did; but as he had contrived to earn for himself a comfortably bad character for stupidity and laziness, and as he timed his evasion well—during the interval between the sale of a bargain of Devonshire stots, and the purchase of a lot of Scotch kyloes, when his services were little needed—and as Master Samuel Goddard had too much to do and to think of, to waste his time and his trouble on a search after a heavy-looking under-drover, with a considerable reputation for laziness, Jesse, for the first time in his life, escaped his ordinary penalties of pursuit and discovery—the parish officers contenting themselves by notifying to Master Samuel Goddard, that they considered their responsibility, legal as well as moral, completely transferred to him in virtue of their indentures, and that whatever might be the future destiny of his unlucky apprentice, whether frozen or famished, hanged or drowned, the blame would rest with the cattle-dealer aforesaid, to whom they resolved to refer all claims on their protection, whether advanced by Jesse himself or by others.
Small intention had Jesse Cliffe to return to their protection or their workhouse! The instinct of freedom was strong in the poor boy—quick and strong as in the beast of the field, or the bird of the air. He betook himself to the Moors (one of his earliest and favourite haunts) with a vague assurance of safety in the deep solitude of those wide-spreading meadows, and the close coppices that surrounded them: and at little more than twelve years of age he began a course of lonely, half-savage, self-dependent life, such as has been rarely heard of in this civilised country. How he lived is to a certain point a mystery. Not by stealing. That was agreed on all hands—except indeed, so far as a few roots of turnips and potatoes, and a few ears of green corn, in their several seasons, may be called theft. Ripe corn for his winter's hoard, he gleaned after the fields were cleared, with a scrupulous honesty that might have read a lesson to peasant children of a happier nurture. And they who had opportunities to watch the process, said that it was curious to see him bruise the grain between large stones, knead the rude flour with fair water, mould his simple cakes, and then bake them in a primitive oven formed by his own labour in a dry bank of the coppice, and heated by rotten wood shaken from the tops of the trees, (which he climbed like a squirrel,) and kindled by a flint and a piece of an old horse-shoe:—such was his unsophisticated cookery! Nuts and berries from the woods; fish from the Kennett—caught with such tackle as might be constructed of a stick and a bit of packthread, with a strong pin or needle formed into a hook; and perhaps an occasional rabbit or partridge, entrapped by some such rough and inartificial contrivance, formed his principal support; a modified, and, according to his vague notions of right and wrong, an innocent form of poaching, since he sought only what was requisite for his own consumption, and would have shunned as a sin the killing game to sell. Money, indeed, he little needed. He formed his bed of fern or dead grass, in the deepest recesses of the coppice—a natural shelter; and the renewal of raiment, which warmth and decency demanded, he obtained by emerging from his solitude, and joining such parties as a love of field sports brought into his vicinity in the pursuit of game—an inspiring combination of labour and diversion, which seemed to awaken something like companionship and sympathy even in this wild boy of the Moors, one in which his knowledge of the haunts and habits of wild animals, his strength, activity, and actual insensibility to hardship or fatigue, rendered his services of more than ordinary value. There was not so good a hare-finder throughout that division of the county; and it was curious to observe how completely his skill in sportmanship overcame the contempt with which grooms and gamekeepers, to say nothing of their less fine and more tolerant masters, were wont to regard poor Jesse's ragged garments, the sunburnt hair and skin, the want of words to express even his simple meaning, and most of all, the strange obliquity of taste which led him to prefer Kennett water to Kennett ale. Sportsmanship, sheer sportsmanship, carried him through all!
Jesse was, as I have said, the most popular hare-finder of the country-side, and during the coursing season was brought by that good gift into considerable communication with his fellow creatures: amongst the rest with his involuntary landlord, John Cobham.
John Cobham was a fair specimen of an English yeoman of the old school—honest, generous, brave, and kind; but in an equal degree, ignorant, obstinate and prejudiced. His first impression respecting Jesse had been one of strong dislike, fostered and cherished by the old labourer Daniel Thorpe, who, accustomed for twenty years to reign sole sovereign of that unpeopled territory, was as much startled at the sight of Jesse's wild, ragged figure, and sunburnt face, as Robinson Crusoe when he first spied the track of a human foot upon his desert island. It was natural that old Daniel should feel his monarchy, or, more correctly speaking, his vice-royalty, invaded and endangered; and at least equally natural that he should communicate his alarm to his master, who sallied forth one November morning to the Moors, fully prepared to drive the intruder from his grounds, and resolved, if necessary, to lodge him in the County Bridewell before night.
But the good farmer, who chanced to be a keen sportsman, and to be followed that day by a favourite greyhound, was so dulcified by the manner in which the delinquent started a hare at the very moment of Venus's passing, and still more by the culprit's keen enjoyment of a capital single-handed course, (in which Venus had even excelled herself,) that he could not find in his heart to take any harsh measures against him, for that day at least, more especially as Venus seemed to have taken a fancy to the lad—so his expulsion was postponed to another season; and before that season arrived, poor Jesse had secured the goodwill of an advocate far more powerful than Venus—an advocate who, contrasted with himself, looked like Ariel by the side of Caliban, or Titania watching over Bottom the Weaver.
John Cobham had married late in life, and had been left, after seven years of happy wedlock, a widower with five children. In his family he may be said to have been singularly fortunate, and singularly unfortunate. Promising in no common degree, his sons and daughters, inheriting their mother's fragile constitution as well as her amiable character, fell victims one after another to the flattering and fatal disease which had carried her off in the prime of life; one of them only, the eldest son, leaving any issue; and his little girl, an orphan, (for her mother had died in bringing her into the world,) was now the only hope and comfort of her doting grandfather, and of a maiden sister who lived with him as housekeeper, and, having officiated as head-nurse in a nobleman's family, was well calculated to bring up a delicate child.
And delicate in all that the word conveys of beauty—delicate as the Virgins of Guido, or the Angels of Correggio, as the valley lily or the maiden rose—was at eight years old, the little charmer, Phoebe Cobham. But it was a delicacy so blended with activity and power, so light and airy, and buoyant and spirited, that the admiration which it awakened was wholly unmingled with fear. Fair, blooming, polished, and pure, her complexion had at once the colouring and the texture of a flower-leaf; and her regular and lovely features—the red smiling lips, the clear blue eyes, the curling golden hair, and the round yet slender figure—formed a most rare combination of childish beauty. The expression, too, at once gentle and lively, the sweet and joyous temper, the quick intellect, and the affectionate heart, rendered little Phoebe one of the most attractive children that the imagination can picture. Her grandfather idolised her; taking her with him in his walks, never weary of carrying her when her own little feet were tired—and it was wonderful how many miles those tiny feet, aided by the gay and buoyant spirit, would compass in the course of the day; and so bent upon keeping her constantly with him, and constantly in the open air, (which he justly considered the best means of warding off the approach of that disease which had proved so fatal to his family,) that he even had a pad constructed, and took her out before him on horseback.