Page:The Eyes of Max Carrados.pdf/23

Rh found him very robust, just under six feet two high, and as ready with his tongue as with his hands and feet. The following year he learned that his sweetheart was being married by her parents to a more eligible rival. Metcalf eloped with her on the night before the wedding and married her himself the next day. From Knaresborough, where they set up house, he walked to London and back, beating the coach on the return journey.

On the outbreak of the '45 he started recruiting for the King and in two days had enlisted one hundred and forty men. Sixty-four of these, Metcalf playing at their head, marched into Newcastle, where they were drafted into Pulteney's regiment. With them Metcalf took part in the battle of Falkirk, and in other engagements down to Culloden. After Culloden he returned to Knaresborough and became horse-dealer, cotton and worsted merchant, and general smuggler. A little later he did well in army contract work, and then started to run a stage-coach between York and Knaresborough, driving it himself both summer and winter.

His extensive journeyings and his coach work had made the blind man familiar, in a very special way, with the roads and the land between them, and in 1765, at the age of forty-eight, he came into his true vocation—that of road construction. It is unnecessary to follow his career in this development; it is enough to say that during the next twenty-seven years he constructed some one hundred and eighty miles of road. Much of it was over very difficult country, some of it, indeed, over country which up to that time had been deemed impossible, but all of it was well made. His plans did not always commend themselves in advance to the authorities. For such a contingency Metcalf had