Jesse Cliffe | Page 2

unthatched, tumble-down
cart-houses, palings rotting to pieces, and pigsties in ruins, contributed,
together with a grand collection of substantial and dingy ricks of fine
old hay--that most valuable but most gloomy looking species of
agricultural property--to the general aspect of desolation by which the
place was distinguished. One solitary old labourer, a dreary bachelor,
inhabited, it is true, a corner of the old roomy house, calculated for the
convenient accommodation of the patriarchal family of sons and
daughters, men-servants and maid-servants, of which a farmer's
household consisted in former days; and one open window, (the
remainder were bricked up to avoid taxes,) occasionally a door ajar,
and still more rarely a thin wreath of smoke ascending from one of the

cold dismal-looking chimneys, gave token that the place was not
wholly abandoned. But the uncultivated garden, the grass growing in
the bricked court, the pond green with duckweed, and the absence of all
living things, cows, horses, pigs, turkeys, geese, or chickens--and still
more of those talking, as well as living things, women and children--all
impressed on the beholder that strange sensation of melancholy which
few can have failed to experience at the sight of an uninhabited human
habitation. The one solitary inmate failed to relieve the pressing sense
of solitude. Nothing but the ringing sound of female voices, the
pleasant and familiar noise of domestic animals, could have done that;
and nothing approaching to noise was ever heard in the Moors. It was a
silence that might be felt.
The house itself was approached through a long, narrow lane, leading
from a wild and watery common; a lane so deeply excavated between
the adjoining hedge-rows, that in winter it was little better than a
water-course; and beyond the barns and stables, where even that
apology for a road terminated, lay the extensive tract of low, level,
marshy ground from whence the farm derived its title; a series of flat,
productive water-meadows, surrounded partly by thick coppices, partly
by the winding Kennett, and divided by deep and broad ditches; a few
pollard willows, so old that the trunk was, in some, riven asunder,
whilst in others nothing but the mere shell remained, together with here
and there a stunted thorn, alone relieving the monotony of the surface.
The only regular inhabitant of this dreary scene was, as I have before
said, the old labourer, Daniel Thorpe, who slept in one corner of the
house, partly to prevent its total dilapidation, and to preserve the
valuable hayricks and the tumble-down farm buildings from the pillage
to which unprotected property is necessarily exposed, and partly to
keep in repair the long line of boundary fence, to clean the graffages,
clear out the moat-like ditches, and see that the hollow-sounding
wooden bridges which formed the sole communication by which the
hay wagons could pass to and from the distant meadows, were in
proper order to sustain their ponderous annual load. Daniel Thorpe was
the only accredited unfeathered biped who figured in the parish books
as occupant of The Moors; nevertheless that swampy district could

boast of one other irregular and forbidden but most pertinacious
inhabitant--and that inhabitant was our hero, Jesse Cliffe.
Jesse Cliffe was a lad some fifteen or sixteen years of age--there or
thereabout; for with the exact date of his birth, although from
circumstances most easily ascertained, even the assistant-overseer did
not take the trouble to make himself acquainted. He was a parish child
born in the workhouse, the offspring of a half-witted orphan girl and a
sturdy vagrant, partly tinker, partly ballad-singer, who took good care
to disappear before the strong arm of justice, in the shape of a tardy
warrant and a halting constable, could contrive to intercept his flight.
He joined, it was said, a tribe of gipsies, to whom he was suspected to
have all along belonged; and who vanishing at the same time,
accompanied by half the linen and poultry of the neighbourhood, were
never heard of in our parts again; whilst the poor girl whom he had
seduced and abandoned, with sense enough to feel her misery, although
hardly sufficient to be responsible for the sin, fretted, moaned, and
pined--losing, she hardly knew how, the half-unconscious
light-heartedness which had almost seemed a compensation for her
deficiency of intellect, and with that light-heartedness losing also her
bodily strength, her flesh, her colour, and her appetite, until, about a
twelvemonth after the birth of her boy, she fell into a decline and died.
Poor Jesse, born and reared in the workhouse, soon began to evince
symptoms of the peculiarities of both his parents. Half-witted like his
mother, wild and roving as his father--it was found impossible to check
his propensity to an out-of-door life.
From the moment, postponed as long as possible in such establishments,
in which he