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/22

 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.

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