Rodney Stone | Page 4

on
Ditching Down, for his hands were as active as his brain was slow. He
was two years my elder, however, so that, long before I had finished
my schooling, he had gone to help his uncle at the smithy.
Friar's Oak is in a dip of the Downs, and the forty-third milestone
between London and Brighton lies on the skirt of the village. It is but a
small place, with an ivied church, a fine vicarage, and a row of
red-brick cottages each in its own little garden. At one end was the
forge of Champion Harrison, with his house behind it, and at the other
was Mr. Allen's school. The yellow cottage, standing back a little from
the road, with its upper story bulging forward and a crisscross of black
woodwork let into the plaster, is the one in which we lived. I do not
know if it is still standing, but I should think it likely, for it was not a
place much given to change.
Just opposite to us, at the other side of the broad, white road, was the
Friar's Oak Inn, which was kept in my day by John Cummings, a man
of excellent repute at home, but liable to strange outbreaks when he
travelled, as will afterwards become apparent. Though there was a
stream of traffic upon the road, the coaches from Brighton were too
fresh to stop, and those from London too eager to reach their journey's
end, so that if it had not been for an occasional broken trace or loosened
wheel, the landlord would have had only the thirsty throats of the
village to trust to. Those were the days when the Prince of Wales had
just built his singular palace by the sea, and so from May to September,
which was the Brighton season, there was never a day that from one to
two hundred curricles, chaises, and phaetons did not rattle past our
doors. Many a summer evening have Boy Jim and I lain upon the grass,
watching all these grand folk, and cheering the London coaches as they
came roaring through the dust clouds, leaders and wheelers stretched to
their work, the bugles screaming and the coachmen with their

low-crowned, curly-brimmed hats, and their faces as scarlet as their
coats. The passengers used to laugh when Boy Jim shouted at them, but
if they could have read his big, half-set limbs and his loose shoulders
aright, they would have looked a little harder at him, perhaps, and
given him back his cheer.
Boy Jim had never known a father or a mother, and his whole life had
been spent with his uncle, Champion Harrison. Harrison was the Friar's
Oak blacksmith, and he had his nickname because he fought Tom
Johnson when he held the English belt, and would most certainly have
beaten him had the Bedfordshire magistrates not appeared to break up
the fight. For years there was no such glutton to take punishment and
no more finishing hitter than Harrison, though he was always, as I
understand, a slow one upon his feet. At last, in a fight with Black
Baruk the Jew, he finished the battle with such a lashing hit that he not
only knocked his opponent over the inner ropes, but he left him betwixt
life and death for long three weeks. During all this time Harrison lived
half demented, expecting every hour to feel the hand of a Bow Street
runner upon his collar, and to be tried for his life. This experience, with
the prayers of his wife, made him forswear the ring for ever, and carry
his great muscles into the one trade in which they seemed to give him
an advantage. There was a good business to be done at Friar's Oak from
the passing traffic and the Sussex farmers, so that he soon became the
richest of the villagers; and he came to church on a Sunday with his
wife and his nephew, looking as respectable a family man as one would
wish to see.
He was not a tall man, not more than five feet seven inches, and it was
often said that if he had had an extra inch of reach he would have been
a match for Jackson or Belcher at their best. His chest was like a barrel,
and his forearms were the most powerful that I have ever seen, with
deep groves between the smooth-swelling muscles like a piece of
water-worn rock. In spite of his strength, however, he was of a slow,
orderly, and kindly disposition, so that there was no man more beloved
over the whole country side. His heavy, placid, clean-shaven face could
set very sternly, as I have seen upon occasion; but for me and every
child in the village