The Cruise of the Land-Yacht «Wanderer»: or, Thirteen Hundred Miles in my Caravan

4. Honest John Bull himself, sure enough, well-to-do-looking in face and dress. He smiles admiringly at us, and seems really to want us to know that he takes an interest in us and our mode of life.

5. The ubiquitous boarding-school girl of gentle seventeen. It may not be etiquette, she knows, to stare or look at passers-by, but for this once only she will have a glance. Lamps shimmering crimson through the big windows, and nicely draped curtains! how can she help it? We are glad she does not try to; her sweet young face refreshes us as do flowers in June, and we forget all about the severe-looking female, who turned away her eyes from beholding vanity.

Milestones and Finger-Posts

England is the land of finger-posts and disreputable milestones. It is the land of lanes, and that is the reason finger-posts are so much needed.

In Scotland they keep up a decent set of milestones, but they do not affect finger-posts. If you want to know the road, climb a hill and look; or ask. In the wildest parts of the Highlands, about Dalwhinnie for instance, you have snow-posts. These look quite out of place in summer, but in winter you must steer straight from one to the other, else, as there is no vestige of a fence, you may tumble over the adjoining precipice.

Like the faces we meet on the roads, we have also types of milestones and finger-posts. Of the former we have —

1. The squat milestone, of stone (page 69).

2. The parallelogram milestone, of stone (page 115).

3. The triangular milestone, also of stone, with reading on two sides (page 124).

4. The round-headed, dilapidated milestone, that tells you nothing (page 141).

5. The wedge-shaped milestone, stone with an iron slab let in (page 159).

6. The reticent milestone, which, instead of names, only gives you letters (page 169).

7. The mushroom milestone, of iron. Forgive the Irish bull. This milestone grows at Nottingham (page 178). So also does —

8. The respectable iron milestone (page 208).

9. The aesthetic milestone, of iron, and found only in the border-land (page 219).

Of finger-posts I shall mention three types: —

1. The solid and respectable.

2. The limp and uncertain.

3. The aesthetic.

But what have we here? A milestone? Nay, but a murder-stone.

I stop the caravan and get down to look and to read the inscription, the gist of which is as follows:

“This stone was erected to mark the spot where Eliza Shepherd, aetat 17, was cruelly murdered in 1817.”

I gaze around me. It is a lovely day, with large white cumulus clouds rolling lazily over a brilliant blue sky. It is a lonely but a lovely place, a fairy-like ferny hollow, close to the edge of a dark wood.

Yes, it is a lovely place now in the sunlight, but I cannot help thinking of that terrible night when poor young Eliza, returning from the shoemaker’s shop, met that tramp who with his knife did the ugly deed. It is satisfactory to learn that he swung for it on the gallows-tree.

But here is a notice-board worth looking at. It is a warning to dog-owners. It reads thus: —

“Notis

Trespassers will be prosecuted

dowgs will be shote.”

On a weird-looking tree behind it hangs a dead cur by the tail.

Here is a Highland post-office, simply a little red-painted dog-kennel on the top of a pole, standing all alone in the middle of a bleak moorland.

Tramps

We meet these everywhere, but more especially on the great highway between Scotland and the South.

While cruising on the coast of Africa, in open boats, wherever we found cocoa-nut trees growing, there we found inhabitants; and so on the roads of England, wherever you find telegraph poles, you will find tramps.

They are of both sexes, and of all sorts and sizes; and, remember, I am not alluding to itinerant gipsies, or even to tinkers, but to the vast army of homeless nomads, who wander from place to place during all the sweet summer weather, and seem to like it.

Sometimes they sell trinkets, such as paper and pins, combs, or trashy jewellery, sometimes they get a day’s work here and there, but mostly they “cadge,” and their characters can be summed up in two words – “liars and vagabonds.” There are honest men on the march among them, however, tradesmen out of work, and flitting south or north in the hopes of bettering their condition. But these latter seldom beg, and if they do, they talk intelligible English.

If a man comes to the back door of your caravan and addresses you thus: “Chuck us a dollop o’ stale tommy, guv’nor, will yer?” you may put him down as a professional tramp. But if you really are an honest tramp, reader – that is, a ragged pedestrian, a pedestrian minus purple and fine linen – then I readily admit that there is something to be said in favour of your peculiar kind of life after all.

To loll about on sunshiny days, to recline upon green mossy banks and dreamily chew the stalks of tender glasses, to saunter on and on and never know nor care what or where you are coming to, to gaze upon and enjoy the beautiful scenery, to listen to song of wild bird and drowsy hum of bee, – all this is pleasant enough, it must be confessed.

Then you can drink of the running stream, unless, as often happens, fortune throws the price of a pint of cold fourpenny in your way. And you have plenty of fresh air. “Too much,” do you say? Yes, because it makes you hungry; but then, there are plenty of turnip fields. Besides, if you call at a cottage, and put on a pitiful face, you will nearly always find some one to “chuck you a dollop o’ stale tommy.”

Do you long for society? There is plenty on the road, plenty of people in the same boat.

And you are your own master; you are as free as the wind that bloweth where it listeth, unless indeed a policeman attempts to check your liberty. But he may not be able to prefer a charge against you; and if he ever goes so far as to lock you up on suspicion, it is only a temporary change in your modus vivendi; you are well-housed and fed for a week or two, then – out and away again.

When night comes on, and the evening star glints out of the himmel-blue, you can generally manage to creep into a shed or shieling of some sort; and if not, you have only to fall back upon the cosy hayrick.

Oh! I believe there are worse lives than yours; and if I were not a gipsy, I am not sure I would not turn a tramp myself.

The Man with the Iron Mask

We came across him frequently away up in the north of England, and a mysterious-looking individual he is, nearly always old, say on the shady side of sixty.

There he sits now on a little three-legged stool by the wayside. In front of him is a kind of anvil, in his hand a hammer. To his right is a heap of stones mingled with gravel; from this he fills a mounted sieve, and rakes the stones therefrom with his hammer as he wants them.

The iron mask is to protect his face and eyes, and a curious spectacle he looks. He has probably been sitting there since morning, but as soon as the shades of evening fall, he will take up his stool and his hammer and wend his way homewards to his little cottage in the glen, and it is to be hoped his “old ’ooman” will have something nice ready for his supper.

The Scotch Collie Dog

Where will you find a dog with a more honest and open countenance than Collie, or one more energetic and willing, or more devoted to his master’s interest? Says Bobbie Burns in his “Twa Dogs:”

“The other was a ploughman’s collie.* * * * *He was a gash (wise) and faithfu’ tyke,As ever lap a sheugh (ditch) or dyke.His honest sonsy bawan’t (white-striped) face,Ay gat him friends in ilka place;His breast was white, his towsie backWeel clad wi’ coat o’ glossy black,His gawcie tail, wi’ upward curl,Hung o’er his hurdils wi’ a swirl.”

You find the collie everywhere all over broad Scotland. The only place where I do not like to see him is on chain.

Yonder he is even now trotting merrily on in front of that farmer’s gig, sometimes barking with half-hysterical joy, sometimes jumping up and kissing the old mare’s soft brown nose, by way of encouraging her.

Yonder again, standing on the top of a stone fence herding cows, and suspiciously eyeing every stranger who passes. He is giving us a line of his mind even now. He says we are only gipsy-folk, and no doubt want to steal a cow and take her away in the caravan.

There runs a collie assisting a sheep-drover. There trots another at the heels of a flock of cattle.

Another is out in the field up there watching the people making hay, while still another is lying on his master’s coat, while that master is at work. His master is only a ditcher. What does that matter? He is a king to Collie.

At Aberuthven was a retriever-collie who – his master, at whose farm I lay, told me – went every day down the long loaning to fetch the letters when the postman blew his horn. This dog’s name is Fred, and it was Fred’s own father who taught him this, and “in two lessons” Fred’s father always went for the letters, and never failed except once to bring them. On this particular occasion, he was seen to disappear behind a bush with a letter in his mouth, and presently to come forth without it. No trace of it was to be found. But a week after another letter was received asking the farmer why he had not acknowledged the bride’s cake. So the murder was out, for the dog’s honesty had not been proof against a bit of cake, and he had swallowed it, envelope and all.

Gipsies’ Dogs

These are, as a rule, a mongrel lot, but very faithful, and contented with their roving life. They are as follows: —

1. The bulldog, used for guard and for fighting, with “a bit o’ money on him” sometimes.

2. The retriever, a useful and determined guard dog and child’s companion.

3. The big mongrel mastiff. The fatter and the uglier he is the better, and the greater the sensation he will create in country villages.

4. The whippet: a handy dog in many ways; and to him gipsies are indebted for many a good stew of hare or rabbit.

5. Lastly, the terribly fat, immensely big black Russian retriever. His tail is always cut off to make him resemble a bear, and give an air of greater éclat to the caravan that owns him.

A Midnight Attack on the “Wanderer.”

We were lying in a lonely meadow, in a rough country away up on the borders of Yorkshire, and did not consider ourselves by any means in a very safe place. The Wanderer was pretty close to the roadside; and there were no houses about except a questionable-looking inn, that stood on the borders of a gloomy wood. The people here might or might not be villainous. At all events, it was not on their account we were uneasy. But a gang of the worst class of gipsies was to pass that night from a neighbouring fair, and there was a probability that they might attack the carriage.

Foley before lying down barricaded the back door with the large Rippingille stove, and I myself had seen to the chambers of my revolver, all six of them.

I had one lookout before lying down. It was a still and sultry summer’s night, with clouds all over the stars, so that it was almost dark. In ten minutes more I was sound asleep.

It must have been long past midnight when I awoke with a start.

Hurricane Bob was growling low and ominously; I could distinctly hear footsteps, and thought I could distinguish voices confabbing in whispers near the van.

It was almost pitch dark now, and from the closeness of the night it was evident a thunderstorm would burst over us.

Silencing the dog, I quickly got on my clothes, just as the caravan began to shake and quiver, as if some one were breaking open the after-door.

My mind was made up at once. I determined to carry the war into the enemy’s quarters, so, seizing my sword, I quietly opened the front door, and slid down to the ground off the coupé.

I got in beneath the caravan and crept aft. There they were, whoever they were; I could just perceive two pairs of legs close to the caravan, and these legs were arrayed in what seemed to me to be white duck trousers. “Now,” said I to myself, “the shin is a most vulnerable part; I’ll have a hack at these extremities with the back of the sword.”

And so I did.

I hit out with all my might.

The effect was magical.

There was a load roar of pain, and away galloped the midnight marauders, in a wild and startled stampede.

And who were they after all? Why, only a couple of young steers, who had been chewing a bath towel – one at one end, the other at the other – that Foley had left hanging under the van.

Such then are some of the humours of an amateur gipsy’s life.

Chapter Sixteen.

Sunny Memories of the Border-Land

“Pipe of Northumbria, sound;War pipe of Alnwicke,Wake the wild hills around;Percy at Paynim war.Fenwicke stand foremost;Scots in array from farSwell wide their war-host.“Come clad in your steel jack,Your war gear in order,And down hew or drive backThe Scots o’er the border.”Old Ballad.

“I tell you what it is, my boy,” said a well-known London editor to me one day, shortly before I started on my long tour in the Wanderer, – “I tell you what it is, you’ll never do it.”

He was standing a little way off my caravan as he spoke, so as to be able to take her all in, optically, and his head was cocked a-trifle to one side, consideringly. “Never do what?”

“Never reach Scotland.”

“Why?”

“Why? First, because a two-ton caravan is too much for even two such horses as you have, considering the hills you will have to encounter; and, secondly,” he added with a sly smile, “because Scotchman never ‘gang back.’”

I seized that little world-wise editor just above the elbow. He looked beseechingly up at me.

“Let go?” he cried; “your fingers are made of iron fencing; my arm isn’t.”

“Can you for one moment imagine,” I said, “what the condition of this England of yours would be were all the Scotchmen to be suddenly taken out of it; suddenly to disappear from great cities like Manchester and Liverpool, from posts of highest duty in London itself, from the Navy, from the Army, from the Volunteers? Is the bare idea not calculated to induce a more dreadful nightmare than even a lobster salad?”

“I think,” said the editor, quietly, as I released him, “we might manage to meet the difficulty.”

But despite the dark forebodings of my neighbours and the insinuations of this editor, here I am in bonnie Scotland.

“My foot in on my native heath,

And my name is – ”

Well, the reader knows what my name is.

I have pleasant recollections of my last day or two’s drive in Northumberland north, just before entering my native land.

Say from the Blue Bell Hotel at Belford. What a stir there was in that pretty little town, to be sure! We were well out of it, because I got the Wanderer brought to anchor in an immensely large stackyard. There was the sound of the circus’s brass band coming from a field some distance off, the occasional whoop-la! of the merry-go-rounds and patent-swing folks, and the bang-banging of rifles at the itinerant shooting galleries; but that was all there was to disturb us.

I couldn’t help thinking that I never saw brawnier, wirier men than those young farmers who met Earl P – at his political meeting.

I remember being somewhat annoyed at having to start in a procession of gipsy vans, but glad when we got up the hill, and when Pea-blossom and Corn-flower gave them all the slip.

Then the splendid country we passed through; the blue sea away on our right; away to the left the everlasting hills! The long low shores of the Holy Isle flanked by its square-towered castle. It is high water while we pass, and Lindisfarne is wholly an island.

“Stay, coachman, stay; let us think; let us dream; let us imagine ourselves back in the days of long, long ago. Yonder island, my Jehu John, which is now so peacefully slumbering ’neath the midday sun, half shrouded in the blue mist of distance, its lordly castle only a shape, its priory now hidden from our view —

“‘The castle with its battled walls,The ancient monastery’s halls,Yon solemn, huge, and dark-red pile,Placed on the margin of the isle.’

” – Have a history, my gentle Jehu, far more worthy of being listened to than any romance that has ever been conceived or penned.

“Aidan the Christian lived and laboured yonder; from his home in that lone, surf-beaten island scintillated, as from a star, the primitive rays of our religion of love.”

Jehu John (speaks): “Excuse me, sir, but that is all a kind o’ Greek to me.”

“Knowest thou not, my gentle John, that more than a thousand years ago that monastery was built there, that —

“‘In Saxon strength that abbey frownedWith massive arches broad and round,That rose alternate row and rowOn pond’rous columns short and low,Built ere the art was known,By pointed aisle and shafted stalkThe arcades of an alleyed walkTo emulate in stone.On those deep walls the heathen DaneHad poured his impious rage in vain.’

“Hast never heard of Saint Cuthbert?”

“No, sir; can’t say as ever I has.”

“John! John! John! But that wondrous, that ‘mutable and unreasonable saint’ dwelt yonder, nor after death did he rest, John, but was seen by many in divers places and at divers times in this kingdom of Britain the Great! Have you never heard the legend that he sailed down the Tweed in a huge stone coffin?”

“Ha! ha! I can’t quite swallow that, sir.”

“That his figure may even until this day be seen, that —

    “‘On a rock by LindisfarneSaint Cuthbert sits and toils to frameThe sea-born beads that bear his name.Such tales had Whitby’s fishers told,And said they might his shape behold,    And hear his anvil sound:A deadened clang – a huge dim formSeen but, and heard, when gathering stormAnd night were closing round.’”

“It makes me a kind of eerie, sir, to hear you talk like that.”

“I can’t help it, John; the poetry of the Great Wizard of the North seems still to hang around these shores. I hear it in the leaves that whisper to the winds, in the wild scream of the sea-birds, and in the surf that comes murmuring across that stretch of sand, or goes hissing round the weed-clad rocks.

“But, John, you’ve heard of Grace Darling?”

“Ah! there I do feel at home.”

“Then you know the story. At the Longstone Lighthouse out yonder she lived. You see the castle of Bamburgh, with its square tower, there. We noticed it all day yesterday while coming to Belford; first we took it for a lighthouse, then for a church, but finally a bright stream of sunshine fell on it from behind a cloud – on it, and on it alone, and suddenly we knew it. Well, in the churchyard there the lassie sleeps.”

“Indeed, sir!”

“Shall we drop a tear to her memory, my gentle Jehu?”

“Don’t think I could screw one out, sir.”

“Then drive on, John.”

I remember stopping at a queer old-fashioned Northumbrian inn for the midday halt. We just drew up at the other side of the road. It was a very lonely place. The inn, with its byres and stables, was perched on the top of a rocky hill, and men and horses had to climb like cats to get up to the doors.

By the way, my horses do climb in a wonderful way. Whenever any one now says to me, “There is a terrible hill a few miles on,” “Can a cat get up?” I inquire.

“Oh, yes, sir; a cat could go up,” is the answer.

“Then,” say I, “my horses will do it.”

At this inn was a very, very old man, and a very, very old woman, and their son Brad. Brad was waiter, ostler, everything, tall, slow, and canny-looking.

Brad, like most of the people hereabout, spoke as though he had swallowed a raw potato, and it had stuck in his throat.

Even the North Northumbrian girls talk as if they suffered from chronic tonsillitis, or their tongues were too broad at the base.

When the dinner had been discussed, the dishes washed, and I had had a rest, the horses staggered down the hill and were put in.

I said to Brad, “How much, my friend?”

“Whhateveh yew plhease, sirr; you’gh a ghentleman,” replied Brad, trying apparently to swallow his tongue. I gave him two shillings.

No sooner had it been put in his trousers pocket than the coin started off on a voyage of discovery down his leg, and soon popped out on to the road. Brad evidently had sprung a leak somewhere, and for a time the money kept dropping from him. Whenever he moved he “layed” a coin, so to speak, and the last I saw of Brad he was leaning lazily against a fence counting his money.

I remember that near the borders we climbed a long, long hill, and were so happy when we got to the top of it – the horses panting and foaming, and we all tired and thirsty.

The view of the long stretch of blue hills behind as was very beautiful.

Here on the hilltop was an inn, with its gable and a row of stables facing the road, and here on a bit of grass we drew up, and determined to take the horses out for the midday halt. But we reckoned without our host. The place was called the Cat Inn.

The landlady was in the kitchen, making a huge pie.

No, we could have no stabling. Their own horses would be home in half an hour.

She followed me out.

“Half an hour’s rest,” I said, “out of the sun will do my poor nags some good.”

“I tell ye, ye canna have it,” she snapped.

“Then we can have a bucket or two of water, I suppose?”

“Never a drop. We’ve barely enough for ourselves.”

I offered to pay for it I talked almost angrily.

“Never a drop. You’re no so ceevil.”

Talking of Northumbrian inns, I remember once having a good laugh.

A buxom young lassie, as fresh as a mountain-daisy, had served me, during a halt, with some ginger-ale.

After drinking and putting the glass down on the table, I was drying my long moustache with my handkerchief, and looking at the lassie thoughtfully – I trust not admiringly.

“Ah, sir,” she said, nodding her head and smiling, “ye need na be wiping your mouth; you’re no goin’ to get a kiss from me.”

But near Tweedmouth, in the fields of oats and wheat, we came upon whole gangs of girls cutting down thistles. Each was armed with a kind of reaping-hook at the end of a pole. Very picturesque they looked at a distance in their short dresses of green, grey, pink, or blue. But the remarkable thing about them was this. They all wore bonnets with an immense flap behind, and in front a wonderful contrivance called “an ugly” – a sunshade which quite protected even their noses. And this was not all, for they had the whole of the jaws, chin, and cheeks tied up with immense handkerchiefs, just as the jaws of the dead are sometimes bound up.

I could not make it out. Riding on with my tricycle some distance ahead of the Wanderer, I came upon a gang of them – twenty-one in all – having a noontide rest, sitting and reclining on the flowery sward.

I could not help stopping to look at them. From the little I could see of their faces some were really pretty. But all these “thistle lassies” had their “uglies” on and their jaws tied up.

I stopped and looked, and I could no more help making the following remark than a lark can help singing.

“By everything that’s mysterious,” I said, “why have you got your jaws tied up? You’re not dead, and you can’t all have the toothache.”

I shall never forget as long as I live the chorus of laughing, the shrieks of laughter, that greeted this innocent little speech of mine. They did laugh, to be sure, and laughed and laughed, and punched each other with open palms, and laughed again, and some had to lie down and roll and laugh. Oh! you just start a Northumbrian lassie laughing, and she will keep it up for a time, I can tell you.

But at last a young thing of maybe sweet seventeen let the handkerchief down-drop from her face, detached herself from the squad, and came towards me.

She put one little hand on the tricycle wheel, and looked into my face with a pair of eyes as blue and liquid as the sea out yonder.

“We tie our chins up,” she said, “to keep the sun off.”

“Oh-h-h!” I said; “and to save your beauty.”

She nodded, and I rode on.

But in speaking of my adventure with the thistle lassies to a man in Berwick – “Yes,” he said, “and those girls on a Sunday come out dressed like ladies in silks and satins.”

I remember that our first blink o’ bonnie Scotland was from the hill above Tweedmouth. And yonder below us lay Berwick, with its tall, tapering spires and vermilion-roofed houses. Away to the left, far as eye could reach, sleeping in the sunlight, was the broad and smiling valley of the Tweed. The sea to the right was bright blue in some places, and a slaty grey where cloud shadows fell. It was dotted with many a white sail, with here and there a steamboat, with a wreath of dark smoke, fathoms long, trailing behind it.