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—*
