Jesse Cliffe | Page 3

doffed the petticoat--a moment, by the way, in which the
obstinate and masterful spirit of the ungentle sex often begins to show
itself in nurseries of a far more polished description;--from that
moment may Jesse's wanderings be said to commence. Disobedience
lurked in the habit masculine. The wilful urchin stood, like some dandy
apprentice, contemplating his brown sturdy legs, as they stuck out from
his new trowsers, already (such was the economy of the tailor
employed on the occasion) "a world too short," and the first use he

made of those useful supporters was to run away. So little did any one
really care for the poor child, that not being missed till night-fall, or
sought after till the next morning, he had strayed far enough, when, at
last picked up, and identified by the parish mark on his new jacket, to
be half frozen, (it was mid-winter when his first elopement happened,)
half-starved, half-drowned, and more than half-dead of fatigue and
exhaustion. "It will be a lesson!" said the moralising matron of the
workhouse, as, after a sound scolding, she fed the little culprit and put
him to bed. "It will be a lesson to the rover!" And so it proved; for,
after being recruited by a few days' nursing, he again ran away, in a
different direction.
When recovered the second time, he was whipped as well as
fed--another lesson which only made the stubborn recusant run the
faster. Then, upon his next return, they shut him up in a dark den
appropriately called the black-hole, a restraint which, of course,
increased his zest for light and liberty, and in the first moment of
freedom--a moment greatly accelerated by his own strenuous efforts in
the shape of squalling, bawling, roaring, and stamping, unparalleled
and insupportable, even in that mansion of din--in the very instant of
freedom he was off again; he ran away from work; he ran away from
school; certain to be immersed in his dismal dungeon as soon as he
could be recaught; so that his whole childhood became a series of
alternate imprisonments and escapes.
That he should be so often lost was, considering his propensities and
the proverbial cunning of his caste, not, perhaps, very remarkable. But
the number of times and the variety of ways, in which, in spite of the
little trouble taken in searching for him, he was sent back to the place
from whence he came, was really something wonderful. If any creature
in the world had cared a straw for the poor child, he must have been
lost over and over: nobody did care for him, and he was as sure to turn
up as a bad guinea. He has been cried like Found Goods in Belford
Market: advertised like a strayed donkey in the H----shire Courant; put
for safe keeping into compters, cages, roundhouses, and bridewells:
passed, by different constables, through half the parishes in the county;
and so frequently and minutely described in handbills and the Hue and

Cry, that by the time he was twelve years old, his stature, features, and
complexion were as well known to the rural police as those of some
great state criminal. In a word, "the lad would live;" and the Aberleigh
overseers, who would doubtless have been far from inconsolable if they
had never happened to hear of him again, were reluctantly obliged to
make the best of their bargain.
Accordingly, they placed him as a sort of boy of all-work at "the shop"
at Hinton, where he remained, upon an accurate computation,
somewhere about seven hours; they then put him with a butcher at
Langley, where he staid about five hours and a-half, arriving at dusk,
and escaping before midnight: then with a baker at Belford, in which
good town he sojourned the (for him) unusual space of two nights and a
day; and then they apprenticed him to Master Samuel Goddard, an
eminent dealer in cattle leaving his new master to punish him according
to law, provided he should run away again. Run away of course he did;
but as he had contrived to earn for himself a comfortably bad character
for stupidity and laziness, and as he timed his evasion well--during the
interval between the sale of a bargain of Devonshire stots, and the
purchase of a lot of Scotch kyloes, when his services were little
needed--and as Master Samuel Goddard had too much to do and to
think of, to waste his time and his trouble on a search after a
heavy-looking under-drover, with a considerable reputation for laziness,
Jesse, for the first time in his life, escaped his ordinary penalties of
pursuit and discovery--the parish officers contenting themselves by
notifying to Master Samuel Goddard, that they considered their
responsibility, legal as well as moral, completely transferred to