BLIND JACK OF KNARESBOROUGH
This is the story of a blind man who did more, without any eyes at all, than many people can do with two. For numbers of children need really to be taught to use their eyes, or they will never see things that are right under their noses; or else they will only see exactly what they are looking for, and nothing besides.
Blind Jack's proper name was John Metcalfe, and he was born in the town of Knaresborough in Yorkshire, in 1717. His parents seem to have been comfortably off—small farmers perhaps, as we are told that Jack learned to ride on his father's horses; and at four years old he was sent to school, exactly as a child of working people would be now. The boy was very quick and had a good memory and his teachers were proud of him, and prophesied that he would be a great scholar, and who knew if some day he might not be Lord Chancellor, or even Archbishop of Canterbury? The Metcalfes quite agreed that nothing was more likely; but a sudden end was put to these dreams when one morning Jack woke with a rash all over his face and chest, and the doctor declared he had got small-pox.
Now in those times, before babies were vaccinated, small-pox was a most terrible disease and very few lived through it without being marked in one way or another. Jack was very ill, but he does not appear to have been pitted like some of the other children who suffered from it, and only his mother observed that when the crisis was over and the boy was getting better every day, and beginning to chatter again, he did not, as was usual with him, make remarks on the things he saw around him or out of the window. Then a dreadful fear shot through her heart. Could it be that he was blind? With great difficulty she controlled her voice and answered the child's questions, but with every hour she understood more clearly that what she dreaded had indeed come to pass. By and bye Jack himself wondered why the curtains always seemed to be drawn in his room and asked his mother to pull them back. She invariably had some good excuse for his remaining in the dark, and little by little the truth dawned on him also. We cannot guess at the poor boy's horror at his fate, nor at his struggles to behave like a man, but as he grew gradually accustomed to his darkness and became stronger, he made up his mind, as other blind people have done, that if he was so unlucky as to have lost his eyes, he would learn to get on just as well without them.
The bare idea of all he would do was exciting. As Jack sat by the fire in the kitchen or lay curled up in the window-seat listening to the horses which went by, he began to make his plans for the future. How fortunate it was that he was able to ride already!—why, most of the boys at school, who were not blind at all, had never been across a horse's back, far less galloped at full speed up and down the street as Jack had loved to do! So he, blind though he was, could do something which they could not, and had the start of them! Now that he could walk about the room without falling down from weakness he must lose no more time, but try and learn the positions of the chairs and tables and count exactly how many steps there were on the staircase, so that he might soon run up and down them as fast as he did before. The next thing was to trust himself in the street, and find his way about. He was rather shy at first, and felt a little bewildered, but he would not go home till he had gone as far as the baker's shop—up and down, up and down, several times over.
'Well, I can go there all right, if mother sends me,' he said to himself, and walked home in triumph to tell his parents.
Having once made a beginning, Jack never let a day pass without learning to do something fresh, till by the time he was nine he could carry messages to any part of Knaresborough as well as another boy. He had a good many friends of his own age, and with them he would go on expeditions into the woods near the town, and even climb trees after birds' eggs. Very quickly the boys discovered that Jack was a better climber than any of them. He was so light, and then he could tell by his sense of touch if a branch was rotten, or whether he might trust himself upon it, and it was not long before it was Jack who was always sent to the top of the tree while the rest remained at the bottom. His mother suffered agonies of fear at first during these hours that the boy was away, but she knew it was no use trying to hinder him, and after a while she ceased to trouble, as Jack never came to harm, and she had too much to do in looking after the younger children to worry about him. It was impossible to keep Jack in the house; if he was not in a tree, he was on the back of a horse or exercising a couple of young hounds that his father had given him; but when, about thirteen, he showed a liking for music, she had him properly taught, in the hope of inducing him to stay at home in the winter evenings.
It was in the summer after this that Blind Jack made friends with some bad boys, whose chief delight consisted of robbing cherry orchards; not so much, if the truth be told, for the sake of the cherries, as for the pleasure of doing what they ought not. One hot night Jack stole quietly to the window of the room which he shared with his little brothers, and swinging himself down through the branches of a tree as lightly as a cat, was over the garden wall in a moment and in the street. Once there he ran quickly to the porch of the parish church, reaching it as the clock struck twelve, and just as the rest of the band, who were waiting for him there, had almost given him up. They set off silently to the orchard and soon had gathered a large basket of ripe cherries, which had been intended by the farmer's wife for the Knaresborough market next day. Enchanted with their booty, the young thieves hurried back in order to eat the cherries comfortably and warmly inside the church. They were in the highest spirits and felt that after their success they were capable of capturing a fort or holding an army at bay. So seizing the big iron ring on the church door which lifted the latch, one of the leaders exclaimed loudly: