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“There’s been nae luck throughout the lan’

Sin’ fwok mud leyke their betters shene;

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.

The mind of Mrs. Sandboys was almost as circumscribed as that of the good Cursty himself. If Sandboys loved his country, and its mountains, she was lost in her kitchen, her beds, and her buckbasket. His soul was hemmed in by “the Hay-Stacks,” Red Pike, Melbrake, and Grassmoor; and hers, by the four walls of Hassness house. She prided herself on her puddings, and did not hesitate to take her stand upon her piecrust. She had often been heard to say, with extreme satisfaction, that her “Buttered sops” were the admiration of the country round—and it was her boast that she could turn the large thin oat-cake at a toss; while the only feud she had ever been known to have in all her life, was with Mrs. Gill, of Low-Houses, Newlands, who declared that in her opinion the cakes were better made with two “backbwords” than one; and though several attempts had been made towards reconciliation, she had ever since withstood all advances towards a renewal of the ancient friendship that had cemented the two families. It was her glory that certain receipts had been in her family—the heirlooms of the eldest daughter—for many generations; and, when roused on the subject, she had been heard to exclaim, that she would not part with her wild raspberry jelly but with her life; and, come what may, she had made up her mind, to carry her “sugared curds” down with her to her grave.

The peculiar feature of Mrs. Sandboys’ mind was to magnify the mildest trifles into violent catastrophes. If a China shepherdess, or porcelain Prince Albert, were broken, she took it almost as much to heart as if a baby had been killed. Washing, to her, was almost a sacred ceremony, the day being invariably accompanied with fasts. Her beds were white as the opposite waters of “Sour Milk Gill;” and the brightness of the brass hobs in the keeping-room at Hassness were brilliant tablets to record her domestic virtues. She was perpetually waging war with cobwebs, and, though naturally of a strong turn of mind, the only time she had been known to faint was, when the only flea ever seen in Hassness House made its appearance full in the front of Cursty Sandboys’ shirt, at his dinner, for the celebration of a Sheep-Shearing Prize. If her husband dreaded visiting London on account of its iniquities, she was deterred by the Cumberland legend of its bugs—for, to her rural mind, the people of the Great Metropolis seemed to be as much preyed upon by these vermin, as the natives of India by the white ants—and it was a conviction firmly implanted in her bosom, that if she once trusted herself in a London four-post, there would be nothing left of her in the morning but her nightcap.

The son and daughter of this hopeful pair were mere common-place creatures. The boy, Jobby, as Joseph is familiarly called in Cumberland, had just shot up into hobbledehoyhood, and was long and thin, as if Nature had drawn him, like a telescope, out of his boots. Though almost a man in stature, he was still a boy in tastes, and full of life and activity—ever, to his mother’s horror, tearing his clothes in climbing the craigs for starlings and magpies, or ransacking the hedges for “spinks” and “skopps;” or else he terrified her by remaining out on the lake long past dusk, in a boat, or delighting to go up into the fells after the sheep, when overblown by the winter’s snow. His mother declared, after the ancient maternal fashion, that it was impossible to keep that boy clean, and however he wore out his clothes and shoes was more than she could tell. The pockets of the youth—of which she occasionally insisted on seeing the contents—will best show his character to the discerning reader; these usually proved to comprise gentles, oat-cake, a leather sucker, percussion caps, a short pipe, (for, truth to say, the youth was studying this great art of modern manhood), a few remaining blaeberries, a Jew’s-harp, a lump of cobbler’s wax, a small coil of shining gut, with fish-hooks at the end, a charge or two of shot, the Cumberland Songster, a many-bladed knife with cork-screw, horsepicker, and saw at the back, together with a small mass of paste, swarming with thin red worms, tied up in one of his sister’s best cambric pocket-handkerchiefs.

Elcy, or Alice Sandboys, the sister of the last-named young gentleman, was some two or three years his elder; and, taking after her mother, had rather more of the Saxon complexion than her father or brother. At that age when the affections seek for something to rest themselves upon, and located where society afforded no fitting object for her sympathies, her girlish bosom found relief in expending its tenderness on pet doves, and squirrels, and magpies, and such gentler creatures as were denizens of her father’s woods. These, and all other animals, she spoke of in diminutive endearment; no matter what the size, all animals were little to her; for, in her own language, her domestic menagerie consisted of her dovey, her doggey, her dickey, her pussey, her scuggy, her piggey, and her cowey. In her extreme love for the animal creation, she would have taken the young trout from its play and liberty in the broad lake beside her, and kept it for ever circling round the crystal treadmill of a glass globe. But the course of her true love ran anything but smooth. Jobby was continually slitting the tongue of her magpie with a silver sixpence, to increase its powers of language, or angling for her gold fish with an elaborate apparatus of hooks, or carrying off her favourite spaniel to have his ears and tail cut in the last new fashion, at the farrier’s, or setting her cat on a board down the lake, or performing a hundred other such freaks as thoughtless youth alone can think of, to the annoyance of susceptible maidens. Herself unaware of the pleasures of which she deprived the animals she caged and globed, and on which her sole anxiety was to heap every kindness, she was continually remonstrating with her brother (we regret to say with little effect) as to the wickedness of fishing, or, indeed, of putting anything to pain.

Such was the character of the family located at Hassness House,—the only residence that animated the solitary banks of Buttermere—and such doubtless would the Sandboys have ever remained but for the advent of the year 1851. The news of the opening of the Great Exhibition had already penetrated the fastnesses of Buttermere, and the villagers, who perhaps, but for the notion that the whole world was about to treat itself to a trip to the metropolis, would have remained quiet in their mountain homes, had been, for months past, subscribing their pennies with the intention of having their share in the general holiday. Buttermere was one universal scene of excitement from Woodhouse to Gatesgarth. Mrs. Nelson was making a double allowance of her excellent oat-cakes; Mrs. Clark, of the Fish Inn, was packing up a jar of sugared butter, among other creature comforts for the occasion. John Cowman was brushing up his top-shirt; Dan Fleming was greasing his calkered boots; John Lancaster was wondering whether his hat were good enough for the great show; all the old dames were busy ironing their deep-frilled caps, and airing their hoods; all the young lasses were stitching at all their dresses, while some of the more nervous villagers, who had never yet trusted themselves to a railway, were secretly making their wills—preparatory to their grand starting for the metropolis.

Amidst this general bustle and excitement there was, however, one house where the master was not absorbed in a calculation as to the probable length and expenses of the journey; where the mistress was not busy preparing for the comfort of the outward and inward man of her lord and master; where the daughter was not in deep consultation as to the prevailing metropolitan fashions—and this house was Hassness. For Mr. Sandboys, with his long-cherished conviction of the wickedness of London, had expressed in unmeasured terms his positive determination that neither he himself, nor any that belonged to him, should ever be exposed to the moral pollution of the metropolis. This was a sentiment in which Mrs. Sandboys heartily concurred, though on very different grounds—the one objecting to the moral, the other to the physical, contamination of the crowded city. Mr. Sandboys had been thrice solicited to join the Buttermere Travelling Club, and thrice he had held out against the most persuasive appeals. But Squire Jopson, who acted as Treasurer to the Travelling Association for the Great Exhibition of 1851, not liking that his old friend Sandboys should be the only one in all Buttermere who absented himself from the general visit to the metropolis, waited upon him at Hassness, to offer him the last chance of availing himself of the advantages of that valuable institution as a means of conveying himself and family, at the smallest possible expense, to the great metropolis, and of allowing him and them a week’s stay, as well as the privilege of participating in all the amusements and gaieties of the capital at its gayest possible time.

It was a severe trial for Sandboys to withstand the united batteries of Jopson’s enthusiastic advocacy, his daughter’s entreaties, his son’s assurances of steadiness. But Sandboys, though naturally possessed of a heart of butter, delighted to assure himself that he carried about a flint in his bosom; so he told Jopson, with a shake of his head, that he might as well try to move Helvellyn or shake Skiddaw; and that, while he blushed for the weakness of his family, he thanked Heaven that he, at least, was adamant.

Jopson showed him by the list he brought with him that the whole of the villagers were going, and that Hassness would be left neighbourless for a circuit of seven miles at least; whereupon Sandboys observed with a chuckle, that the place could not be much more quiet than it was, and that with those fine fellows, Robinson and Davy Top, and Dod and Honister around him, he should never want company.

Jopson talked sagely of youths seeing the world and expanding their minds by travel; whereat the eyes of the younger Sandboys glistened; but the father rejoined, that travel was of use only for the natural beauties of the scenery it revealed, and the virtues of the people with whom it brought the traveller into association; “and where,” he asked, with evident pride of county, “could more natural beauty or greater native virtue be found, than amongst the mountains and the pastoral race of Buttermere?” Seizing the latest Times that had reached him the evening before, he pointed triumphantly to some paragraph, headed “Ingenious Fraud on a Yokel!” wherein a country gentleman had been cleverly duped of some hundreds of pounds paid to him that morning at Smithfield; and he asked with sarcasm, whether those were the scenes and those the people that Jopson thought he could improve his son Jobby by introducing him to?

In vain Jopson pulled from his pocket a counter newspaper, and showed him the plan of some Monster Lodging House which was to afford accommodation for one thousand persons from the country at one and the same time, “for one-and-three per night!”—how, for this small sum, each of the thousand was to be provided “with bedstead, good wool mattress, sheets, blankets, and coverlet; with soap, towels, and every accommodation for ablution;”—how the two thousand boots of the thousand lodgers were to be cleaned at one penny per pair, and their one thousand chins to be shaven by relays of barbers continually in attendance—how a surgeon was “to attend at nine o’clock every morning,” to examine the lodgers, and “instantly remove all cases of infectious disease”—how there was to be “a smoking-room, detached from the main-building, where a band of music was to play every evening, gratis”—how omnibuses to all the theatres and amusements and sights were to carry the thousand sight-seers at one penny per head—how “cold roast and boiled beef and mutton, and ditto ditto sausages and bacon, and pickles, salads, and fruit pies (when to be procured), were to be furnished, at fixed prices,” to the thousand country gentlemen with the thousand country appetites—how “all the dormitories were to be well lighted with gas to secure the complete privacy of the occupants”—how “they were to be watched over by efficient wardens and police constables”—how “an office was to be opened for the security of luggage”—and how “the proprietor pledged himself that every care should be taken to ensure the comfort, convenience, and strict discipline of so large a body.”

Sandboys, who had sat perfectly quiet while Jobson was detailing the several advantages of this Brobdignagian boarding-house, burst out at the completion of the narrative with a demand to be informed whether it was probable that he, who had passed his whole life in a village consisting of fifteen houses and but seven families, would, in his fifty-fifth year, consent to take up his abode with a thousand people under one roof, with a gas-light to secure the privacy of his bed-room, policemen to watch him all night, and a surgeon to examine him in the morning!

Having thus delivered himself, he turned round, with satisfaction, to appeal to his wife and children, when he found them, to his horror, with the newspaper in their hands, busily admiring the picture of the very building that he had so forcibly denounced.

Early the next morning, Mrs. Sandboys, with Jobby and Elcy, went down to the Fish Inn, to see the dozen carts and cars leave, with the united villagers of Buttermere, for the “Travellers’ Train” at Cockermouth. There was the stalwart Daniel Fleming, of the White Howe, mounted on his horse, with his wife, her baby in her arms, and the children, with the farm maid, in the cart,—his two men trudging by its side. There was John Clark, of Wilkinsyke, the farmer and statesman, with his black-haired sons, Isaac and Johnny, while Richard rode the piebald pony; and Joseph and his wife, with little Grace, and their rosy-cheeked maid, Susannah, from the Fish Inn, sat in the car, kept at other times for the accommodation of their visitors. After them came Isaac Cowman, of the Croft, the red-faced farmer-constable, with his fine tall, flaxen, Saxon family about him; and, following in his wake, his Roman-nosed nephew John, the host of “The Victoria,” with his brisk, bustling wife on his arm. Then came handsome old John Lancaster, seventy years of age, and as straight as the mountain larch, with his wife and his sons, Andrew and Robert, and their wives. And following these, John Branthwaite, of Bowtherbeck, the parish-clerk, with his wife and wife’s mother; and Edward Nelson, the sheep-breeder, of Gatesgarth, dressed in his well-known suit of grey, with his buxom gudewife, and her three boys and her two girls by her side; while the fresh-coloured bonnie lassie, her maid, Betty Gatesgarth, of Gatesgarth, in her bright green dress and pink ribbons, strutted along in their wake. Then came the Riggs’: James Rigg, the miner, of Scots Tuft, who had come over from his work at Cleator for the special holiday; and there were his wife and young boys, and Jane Rigg, the widow, and her daughter Mary Ann, the grey-eyed beauty of Buttermere, in her jaunty jacket-waisted dress; with her swarthy black-whiskered Celtic brother, and his pleasant-faced Saxon wife carrying their chubby-cheeked child; and behind them came Ann Rigg, the slater’s widow, from Craig House, with her boys and little girl; and, leaning on their shoulders, the eighty-years old, white-haired Braithwaite Rigg and his venerable dame; and close upon them was seen old Rowley Lightfoot, his wife, and son John. Squire Jobson’s man walked beside the car from the Fish Inn, talking to the tidy, clean old housekeeper of Woodhouse; while the Squire himself rode in the rear, proud and happy as he marshalled the merry little band along;—for, truth to say, it would have been difficult to find in any other part of England so much manliness and so much rustic beauty centred in so small a spot.

As they moved gently along the road, John Cowman, the host of the Victoria, struck up the following well-known song, which was welcomed with a shout from the whole “lating”—

“I’s Borrowdale Jwohnny, just cumt up to Lunnon,

Nay, gurn nit at me, for fear I laugh at you;

I’ve seen kneaves donn’d i’ silks, and gud men gang in tatters;

The truth we sud tell, and gi’e auld Nick his due.”

Then the gust rushed down the valley, and the voices of the happy holiday throng were swept, for a moment, away; as it lulled again, the ear, familiar to the song, could catch the laugh and cheers that accompanied the next verse:—

“‘Keep frae’t lasses, and ne’er look ahint thee.’

‘We’re deep as the best o’ them, fadder,’ says I.

They packed up ae sark, Sunday weascwoat, twee neckcloths,

Wot bannock, cauld dumplin’, and top stannin’ pye;”

Again the voices were lost in the turning of the road, and presently, as they shot out once more, they might be heard singing in full chorus—

“Ca’ and see cousin Jacep, he’s got a’ the money;

He’ll get thee some guver’ment pleace to be seer.”

At last, all was still—but scarcely more still than when the whole of the cottages were filled with their little families, for the village, though now utterly deserted, would have seemed to the stranger to have been as thickly populated and busy as ever.