Fortune, however, by depriving my parents of everything except myself, and myself of everything except a flute, made me a raggle-taggle wanderer, dependent for my livelihood on the charms of music.
Ignorant of luxury through the exigencies of a nomadic existence, I owned nevertheless a very fastidious taste which often led me to despise the miseries of my situation—so much so that I believe I would rather a thousand times depend on the hard ground than sacrifice my sensibility in the endurance of an uncongenial bedfellow.
So much by way of explaining the following adventure, which was actually produced by my inability to suffer a common hardship of the wanderer’s lot.
On a December dusk of the year 1753, I found myself, with apparently no prospect of a lodging, on a bleak high-road in the middle of Cornwall. What horrid impulse took me to that barbarous peninsula, I cannot now recall exactly; but probably my journey was connected with some roadside rumour of prosperity to be found in the West of England at the holiday season.
My first experience of Cornish hospitality was not happy; for, having begun to flute merrily in the yard of an outlying farmhouse, the savage owner loosed a pair of lean hounds, who followed me with a very odious barking nearly half a mile along the road. I was determined to avoid such places in future, and to keep my breath for a town, where the amenity of a closer social intercourse might have evolved a more generous spirit among the inhabitants.
With gloomy thoughts I trudged on, without a glimpse of any village or hamlet, or even of an isolated dwelling such as I had lately tried.
The night was coming up fast behind me, and I was already pondering the imminent extinction of my life’s flame in the wind-swept bogs on either side of the path, when I came suddenly on a small inn, not visible before on account of the road’s curve and a clump of firs shorn and blistered by the prevailing wind.
Here I asked for a bed; but on being informed that I must share it with a degraded idiot whom I perceived slobbering in a corner of the taproom, I scorned the accommodation and inquired the distance and direction of the nearest village.
“There’s no village for another five mile or more,” said the landlord. “What’s your trade, master?”
I did not wish to gratify the bumpkin’s curiosity; but reflecting that I might hear of a junketing in the neighbourhood, told him I was a musician.