HYDE MARSTON; OR, RECOLLECTIONS OF A SPORTSMAN'S LIFE. BY THE EDITOR. CHAPTER THE THIRTY-SEVENTH.-LE PREMIER PAS. "Ah, happy hills ah, pleasing shade! Ah, fields beloved in vain! Where once my careless childhood stray'd, ODE TO ETON COLLEGE. Moses Primrose, on his return from his first passage in horsedealing at the fair, tells his father that the style of reception his merchandise met with when he exposed it for sale, made him despair of finding any one who would accept it as a gift. There may be a worse way to get rid of one's chattels than making a present of them. I remember somewhere reading the fiscal phases through which an English potato passes on the way to its final destination....It is raised in taxed ground, dug with a taxed spade, put into a taxed sack, conveyed in a taxed cart along a taxed road, and sold to a taxed shopkeeper, who retails it with five hundred per cent. of mortal imposts on its pabulum. The man who disposes of his goods at the hammer is pretty much in the same category, besides being required to pay a swingeing compliment to boot. He offers them for sale in a taxed house (to say nothing about the rent), through a taxed advertisement, by means of a taxed (licensed) auctioneer, who charges his tax in the shape of a five per centage, and there is another five per cent. tax to the Queen as a bonus for being allowed to incur the other taxes, to which, if your "roup," as the Scotch call it, comes off in the country, may be added victuals and drink, ad libitum, to all who may have nothing better to do than attend it. All this, and more, was made familiar to me, in consequence of the steps I found it necessary to adopt at B- upon the sad occasion related in the last chapter. Having come to the resolution of letting the house furnished, with a portion of the domain attached, for a few years, I gave directions that the stock, farm produce, and materials, should be disposed of by the ordinary process. At rural auctions the custom is for all the neighbours to muster some hours before business commences, and each having ascertained what the other wants, with the perfection of good breeding, nobody bids against anybody-whence the result may be easily understood. I saw my corn and cattle simpered away to squire this and farmer that, at whatever price they might think fit to begin (and end) with, most philosophically; but when a three-year-old thorough-bred colt, that stood me in a hundred. pounds before it was born, was knocked down to the lord of the manor for fifteen, I was obliged to decamp, for fear the purchaser should fare the same. This was my first overt experience of life-shrewd household life-that social condition whose currency is a mixed circulation of coin and cunning, and, like Ferdinand Count Fathom, "I became fully convinced that the sons of men prey upon each other." No one who has not stood to see his household gods unshrined around him, knows the bitterness that waits upon the breaking up of an old establishment -the tearing up by the roots a whole heart's harvest of indigenous manners, customs, and affections. My trial at B- was the first but not the least severe it has pleased Providence I should undergo. There was strength enough in my nature to hold up against the partings with old servants, retainers, and dependants, whose relation, like that of the ivy to the oak, had bound them haply more closely to my fortunes, but when for the last time I wandered where the sunny hours of childhood were passed-the golden hopes of boyhood born and fostered-the feeble and irresolute step with which I sought those spirit-consecrated scenes while yet the worship was worthy, told too truly the feelings of the loiterer. In such melancholy occupation I whiled away the time devoted to the dispersion of my moveables. From some remote nook of the grounds, unobserved, I noted load after load depart, with the sternness of a stoic. It was the evening of the last of these ungracious days, and in sad retrospection I was pacing a retired walk at a distance from the main avenue, when I perceived some one passing down it, leading a brace of spaniels; as they drew nearer, I could discern that they were two of my old and especial favouritesshadows of my path in many a greenwood ramble. At the same instant the animals descried their master, and darting towards me with desperate force, they fairly ran away with the keeper who had them in his custody. He was an old man, and through brake and brier they tore him, as the Tartar horse did Mazeppa; now he stumbled, and parted company with his hat-anon, prostrate, his wig deserted him; still they bore him remorselessly onwards. Bald-headed and begrimed, bruised and breathless, they deposited him at my feet-awhile crouched before me, and then, wild with rapture, beat me almost to the earth with their caresses. At first I shouted aloud with uncontrollable laughter at the absurdity of the spectacle; and then, as memory called back the machinery which moved it and the moral it told, I turned aside and groaned in the labour of my thoughts. I set down small incidents such as these, because they are the clues by which that intricate moral labyrinth, the economy of human life, may best be unravelled. They are the lights as well as the shadows on the path of our pilgrimage, for neither the world of philosophy nor physics is always in eclipse. Peradventure mine may not have enjoyed as much sunshine as commonly cheers the summer of existence but he is a sorry artist who exhibits his work in a bad point of sight. For this reason we will summarily extricate us from Band its shadows-standing not on the order of our going, but accomplishing it by means of the most potent agent of locomotion yet discovered, the sic volo sic jubeo of an author. Six weeks had passed in gloomy occupations and scarce less sombre reflections, when at length the hour of emancipation came, and my final arrangements were completed. In spite of every ingenuity of artifice, sharp practice, and many excellent imitations of robbery, a considerable sum was realized by the sale; and with this, reduced to a monetary essence, in form of a letter of credit on Jones and Lloyd, I prepared to leave B- for a lengthened absence, having given my agent |