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
