Page:The world's show, 1851, or, The adventures of Mr. and Mrs. Sandboys and family, who came up to London to "enjoy themselves", and to see the Great Exhibition (IA worldsshow1851or00mayh).pdf/21

 CHAPTER II.

"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