Part 2

"Art thou mad, Kucky Sarson?" asked the farmer, "or what is the reason that thou art scampering away at such a hare-brained rate?"

"The gypsy!" gasped the barber, still striving to run,—"the gypsy and the gentleman!"

"Pshaw, man!—the gentleman has suddenly found his sister who was stolen when she was young," said the farmer: "the gentleman has explained it all himself, and has taken the young woman into the Pelham's Arms, where he puts up. I thought thou hadst had more sense, Kucky, than to run after any crowd that gathered in the street."

"Crowd!" echoed the barber, "was there a crowd then?

"A crowd!" repeated the farmer, "that was there, I assure thee. There: good-bye, Kucky!" and so saying he loosed hold of his neighbour, who was now in some degree cooled down.

Kucky Sarson did not set off to run again; but walked musingly on towards the Pelham's Arms Inn, resolved, if possible, to get at the bottom of the curious incidents just related. He was shown into the strange gentleman's room at once, when he had intimated that it would be inconvenient for him to call at six in the evening. And now the barber felt completely embarrassed, and quite ashamed of his own curiosity, in having forced himself upon the stranger so suddenly after the affecting occurrence he had just been informed of by old farmer Garbutt. In fact, Kucky had begun to stammer forth very odd apologies, and was backing out of the room with a profusion of bows and scrapes, when the gentleman rose, and leading his newly-recovered relative by the hand, introduced her to his humble visitor. Kucky Sarson recognised her face for the same he had seen in the narrow street a short time before; but the altered dress and demeanour of the female caused him to take her hand with much greater reverence than he would have shown had that hand been offered him when he first saw its owner.

"I saw you a short time ago, when my brother had just discovered me," observed the female, as the barber took her hand.

"You did, madam," replied he, stammering with confusion, and surprised at the peculiar grace wherewith, he now thought, the gypsy conducted herself.

"No doubt you felt greatly surprised when you saw us," observed the gentleman.

"I must say I did," answered the barber, still looking very bashful.

"Did you witness any of my capers in the street, my friend? I am fearful that I have played a somewhat foolish part, for my elation well nigh drove me out of my senses. Come, my good friend," concluded the gentleman, noting the shy look of the barber, "let us sit down, and, over a comfortable glass of wine, talk over this matter;—not forgetting your family adage of 'Right is every man's, but Wrong is no man's right.'"

They were seated accordingly; and the barber, having been plied with a couple of glasses of claret, and his shame-facedness having vanished, the gentleman renewed the conversation, with a look of great good-humour.

"My good friend," said he, "I remember an observation of yours which, it strikes me, you cannot always bring to bear upon your mind with the force of a maxim, although you profess to have made it one: it was that 'When we believe all men to be equal, we ought to treat every man like a gentleman.' Now, tell me, frankly, did you not completely forget your principles of equality at the moment you saw me with this my beloved and only sister, in the guise of a vagabond gypsy?" The gentleman took the hand of his recovered relative once more in his own, and they looked with joy and love upon each other.

The barber felt conscience-stricken with the inconsistency between his philosophy and his practice, in this notable instance, and, despite his natural loquacity, remained dumb.

"Nay, my good friend," resumed the stranger; "do not think yourself unlike other people. Let me see you rally, and display the spirit you did this morning: all the world is too prone to fail in the act of applying principles and professions to practice."

"I do, indeed, feel," said the barber at length, but still hanging down his head, "that I have _not_ felt and acted as a disciple of the great doctrine of equality ought to have felt and acted this day."

"And I think you will not fail to draw this great lesson from your own experience, my friend," rejoined the gentleman, "that, however intrinsically true it may be that we are all equal in the eye of Him who made us, yet our birth, our early associations, our habits,—in brief, the whole complexity of circumstances with which we are every hour, nay, every moment, surrounded, renders it absolutely impossible for any of us to act at all times, or even generally, upon the conviction of that most undeniable and solemn truth."

"You are perfectly right, sir," replied the barber, conscious that the stranger spoke the language of common sense, and feeling humbled into willing discipleship.

"And, granting the doctrine of equality to be strictly true," continued the gentleman, "yet how long, how very long must it be, ere the race of mankind shall be able to throw off their prejudices—their present artificial condition, shall we call it?—so completely as to reinduce and reinstate that universal equality we have just agreed to be natural."

"Very sensible, sir," interjected Kucky Sarson; "but I am just thinking," he added, feeling some return of his usual confidence, "that equality never will be reinstated, unless we spread its great doctrines by all the means in our power. Equality must be enuntiated, maintained, and defended, sir; or, like other truths which have lain hid for ages, it will not produce any fruit."

"True, my good friend," answered the gentleman; "but permit me to remind you that practice is more powerful than precept. If we each sought to act towards our fellow-creatures as if they were really our brethren and sisters, the principles of a true equality would soon gain a citadel in each human heart. It is the putting into practice of this deep conviction of our common brotherhood which is really most worthy of our endeavours. We may contend against the artificial distinctions which are established among men till doomsday; but if we do not, on all occasions, display brotherly feeling towards our fellows, our contention will produce no salutary effect."

"Indeed, sir," said the barber, "I feel you are by far the more consistent philosopher of the two——"

"Nay," said the gentleman, cutting short the barber's strain of intended panegyric; "I would not have you suppose that I am a perfect practiser of the maxims I am recommending. I never yet found a man who fulfilled his own definition of a philanthropist, a patriot, or a philosopher,—that is, if his definition were worthy of being termed one. I only press this fact upon your notice, my friend: that I was once in the habit of talking as loudly about equality as yourself,—nay, even dogmatically about it, and that is _not_ like your way of talking; but I have ceased to talk about the name, and am now endeavouring to spread the spirit of it. I try to do all the good I can, to make every one as happy as I can, to banish all the misery I can. I cannot always keep in mind that every human being I meet is my brother or sister; for the force of old habit is such that a pernicious aristocracy moves within me sometimes, but I try to keep it down. My friend, I am preaching _to_ you, rather than conversing _with_ you; but we will now leave this subject for some lighter theme, if you please; only permit me to say, in conclusion, that you must never believe yourself to be a thorough disciple of Equality while a grain of offence arises in your mind on seeing a gentleman converse with a gypsy."

It would be tiresome to pursue any further the conversation of the barber and the strange gentleman. Suffice it to say that Kucky Sarson was an altered man from that day, though he never saw the gentleman again. He subdued the habit of expressing his convictions in terms which he knew must give offence and create prejudice, rather than advance truth, couch them as courteously as he might in the flourish of politeness. He turned his efforts, in the humble sphere of his conventional existence, rather towards preparing the world for rigid truth, than towards impelling the people into the acknowledgment and practice of principles of which they had not as yet learned the alphabet. These changes, to Kucky Sarson's honour be it spoken, came over his spirit, not through cowardice,—for he possessed enough of strength of mind and principle to have braved a prison, had he thought his lot cast in the fitting and becoming time: it was honest conviction which acted as a mollifier of Kucky's manners, and the usefulness of the change in him was evidenced by the greater good he effected in his modified character. He preserved his grandfather's favourite saying to the last day of his life; and, as no one sought more ardently to fulfil the character of an humble philanthropist,—to alleviate distress wherever he found it,—to soften and dissipate asperity of temper, and to create the genuine feeling of brotherhood, and the practice of self-sacrifice among all men,—so his name and favourite adage were remembered after his death; insomuch that when a word tending to difference arose among the plain inhabitants of Caistor-in-Lindsey, it was usually succeeded, and the difference prevented, by some one observing, "Why, neighbours, what's the use of wrangling? You know what good Kucky Sarson used to say,—'Right is every man's, and Wrong is no man's right.'"

RAVEN DICK, THE POACHER; OR, "WHO SCRATCHED THE BULL?"

Kiah Dobson,—they always called him Kiah "for shortness sake," as we used to say in Lincolnshire; but his full name was Hezekiah,—Kiah Dobson was a hearty buck of a farmer, who ploughed about fifty acres, and fed sheep and bullocks on about fifty others. He was a tenant of good old Squire Anderson, the ancestor of the Yarboroughs, who are called Lords in these new-fashioned times. Lindsey and its largest landlord presented, it need scarcely be said, very different features sixty years ago to those they present now. Squire Anderson kept a coach, but he had not three or four, like his successor, the peer: he had one good house at Manby, but he had not that and a much grander one at Brocklesby, another at Appuldercome, in the Isle of Wight, and another in town.

The farmers of Lindsey kept each a good nag, for market service, and so forth; but it was a very, very scarce thing to find a blood horse in their stables; and when their dames went to market, it was on the pillion-seat, behind the farmer himself, and not in the modern kickshaw gig. There were none of your strongholds of starvation, which the famishing thousands call "Bastiles," in those days; and a horn of good humming ale, and a motherly slice of bread and cheese, awaited the acceptance of any poor man who happened to be journeying, and called either at the hall of the squire or at the cottages of any of the farmers on his extensive estates.

Kiah Dobson was nearing his cottage one November evening, a little before dusk, when a figure caught his eye, the sight of which roused his gall,—and yet Kiah was by no means a choleric or hasty-tempered man. It was Raven Dick, the poacher, that the farmer was so wroth to see; for Dick was beheld as the farmer had beheld him nearly fifty times before,—with a bundle of dead hares under his arm. The farmer turned to cross the home-close in another direction, willing, as it seemed, to give Dick another fair opportunity of getting safely away. But "the devil was in Dick for impudence," as Kiah used often to say,—"if you gave him an inch, he would be sure to take an ell!" Not content with imposing on farmer Dobson's good-nature forty-nine times in the course of his harum-scarum life, he must e'en "try it on" for the fiftieth, and so made the experiment just once too often.

"Farmer! how d'ye feel yoursen?" said Dick, striding up to Kiah Dobson, and looking him full in the face, as bold as a bull-dog.

"Better than thou'lt feel, scapegrace! when thou gets thy hempen collar on!" replied the farmer, snarling as angrily as a mastiff when he doesn't like you.

"May be the thread of it isn't spun yet," retorted Dick, mocking the farmer's angry tone.

"Surely, old Nick himself isn't more impudent than his children that wear his own colour!" exclaimed Kiah, darting a withering look at Dick's black face, for Dick's skin was even swarthier than a gypsy's; and I might as well say now as at any other time, that the sable shade of Dick's countenance, coupled with their knowledge of his wild way of life, were the emphatic reasons why his neighbours gave him the epithet of "Raven."

Now, above all things, Dick did not like these reflections on his unfair colour; so, with something in the shape of an oath, Dick turned his heel in dudgeon, and seemed, not at all to the farmer's displeasure, to be bent on making his way home.

Dame Dobson, who was a stout country-wife, and was labouring lustily at her churn, and scolding one of her maids, who had been idling, just as her husband entered the cottage, caught a sight of the well-known poacher with the hares under his arm ere the farmer could close the door, and, with the anger that her maid had kindled, was ill prepared to brook new provocation.

"Shame on thee, Kiah, for letting that rascal escape so often!" she exclaimed, screaming so loudly that Dick could hear her words distinctly, though nearly half way over the close; "it will come to the Squire's ears at long-last, thou may depend on't! and then thou knowst what will follow!"

"Hang the villain!" said Kiah, "he really deserves nabbing; and I've half a mind to go after him and collar him; for, confound him! he grows more brazenly impudent than a miller's horse! he's getting worse than come-out!"

"You'll ha' no need to do that," said the incorrigibly idle maiden, who had gone to the window to peep at the poacher, in spite of her mistress's fierce scolding, "he's turned again, and has been listening to you, and now he's coming hither as fast as shanks' horse can carry him!"

And so it was, for Dick had changed his intent; and, with a perverse will, now strode, at full stretch, towards the door of the farm house.

"Curse his gallows-neck!" exclaimed farmer Dobson, between his teeth, when he heard the maiden's words: "has he such a brass-face as that comes to? I'll nab him this time, or I'm a Dutchman else!"

Raven Dick's foot was on the grunsel almost before the farmer had finished this last sentence; and throwing himself on a chair in the kitchen, and the hares on the cottage floor, alike with the air and impudence of one who braves the gallows, he asked for a horn of ale and a lump of bread and cheese with as little ceremony as if he had been a squire in his own mansion. Dick's audacity, however, had now overstretched its mark. The farmer's strong fist was on Dick's frock collar in a moment; the next, the farmer had dragged him from his seat; and, in the third, Dick was prostrate on the cottage floor. Unluckily, Kiah Dobson's anger overbalanced his caution; and, with the impetuosity of his own force upon the poacher, Kiah brought himself, also, to the floor.

Dick had so long careered it over the farmer's fields, by day and by night, and had so often "snickled," or noosed the hares, as one may say, under the farmer's nose, and the farmer had all the while taken it so mildly, that the poacher was never more surprised in his life than at this portentous assault upon his person by mild, good-natured Kiah Dobson. Had it not been for his imaginary security of feeling, the poacher would not so easily have been overthrown. And, as it was, Dick was not disposed to believe that all was over with him; he speedily succeeded in wriggling his body from under the farmer's weight, and, in the course of a few minutes, had his knee upon Kiah's breast, and began to grab the farmer so tightly by the throat that he soon grew blacker than Dick himself. Luckily Dame Dobson's churn staff came to the rescue. She pommelled the hard head of the poacher so soundly, and her strokes came so thick and fast after each other, that he was compelled to loose his hold on the farmer's throat, in order to catch the churn-staff from the farmer's wife. The engagement, however, now became more furious. Poor Kiah lay gasping on the floor, for some moments, unable to rise, much less to aim a blow at the adversary; but the war was at its height between Raven Dick and the dame, and two stout maidens of her service. Mops, brooms, and brushes were successively impelled with no playful force towards the seasoned skull of the poacher, but were shivered with the rapidity of lightning, as he dexterously caught hold of them, and wrested them from the hands of his clamorous assailants. The din of female tongues was scarcely less than the noise of blows; and when the more effective ammunition was all expended, the discharge was confined, at last, to the small shot of epithets, poured in every imaginable shape, from the fair musketry of the three female belligerents' mouths.

The scene had now become as laughable as previously it had been serious. Raven Dick stood on a chair in the middle of the floor, drawing his face into the most whimsical forms and mocking the women, while they stood around him, each with hands on hip, and tearing their throats with the effort to abuse and irritate, or otherwise to shame him. The farmer, seeing what turn the war had taken, had seated himself on a chair, and forgetting his anger, was shaking his sides with laughter at the ludicrous and unwonted scene presented that night in his kitchen. The affray at length shrank into silence; the women's tongues were fairly wearied; they each sat down to rest; and so Dick sat down, likewise.

"Dang it Dick, thou'rt a good woolled 'un!" said the hearty farmer; "but thou art an idle rogue, after all."

"How so, Maister Kiah?" asked the saucy poacher; "why do you call me an idle rogue?"

"Because thou art fonder of stealing than working," quickly replied the farmer.

"Stealing, say you?" rejoined Dick, his brows knitting together; "I scorn your words, Kiah Dobson!—You lie in your throat!—What do I steal?"

"The 'squire's hares, by dozens, thou saucy varlet," answered Kiah.

"How come they to be the 'squire's hares?" asked Dick, fixing his eyes very keenly on the farmer.

"By feeding and breeding on his land," answered Kiah Dobson.

"But don't _you_ plough the land, Farmer Dobson?"

"To be sure I do——"

"And don't _you_ buy the seed to sow upon the land?"

"Sartainly I do——"

"And don't _you_ sow the seed when you have bought it?"

"Ay, and I can sow a breadth with here and there a fellow in any——"

"Pshaw!—don't _you_ watch the corn while it is growing, weed it, and attend to it till it is ripe? and do not _you_, with the sweat of your own brow, and the help of those you hire with your own purse, reap the corn, and gather it into the stack-yard?—and don't _you_, afterwards, pay many a shilling in wages for Roger Brown, and Tim Wilson, and others, to thrash your corn for you?—and don't you consider the corn _yours_ when you are taking it to market?—and don't you think _you_ have a right to receive the money for which you sell it?"

"Ay, and I would fain be knowing, Dick, who besides has so good a right to it as I have," replied the farmer, starting to his feet with warmth, and not apprehending the drift of Dick's queries.

"Then the corn which these poor hares have eaten during the summer," said Dick, pointing to the dead animals which lay on the floor, "was _your_ corn, and _not_ the 'squire's, for you pay him his rent, don't you, Kiah?"

"Zounds, ay! to the very day," instantly and proudly replied the farmer.

"And yet _you_ durst not kill a hare, and be seen in doing it," said Dick, not permitting a moment's pause to take place.

"Me kill a hare!" exclaimed Kiah, scratching his head, and colouring very deeply; "Lord! you know, Dick, I've no licence; and, besides, the 'squire always reckons the hares his own, you know."

"Does he?" said Dick, with a peculiar sneer, "then he's a fool for so doing.—Why, Farmer Dobson, don't you remember how, last latter-end, three persons came from Lincoln, and went shooting like wild devils over the whole estate, murdering and bagging all they could see? And it's more than likely you'll have a greater number of the Lincoln Minster Jackdaws, as the 'squire called 'em, this month than you had last November; and will the 'squire be such a fool as to call the hares his own then, when the black thieves are packing off with them, think you?"

"Dang it! thou talks very odd, Dick!" said the farmer, sitting down very quietly, fixing his eyes on the floor, and scratching his head harder than before; "thou talks very odd, but what thou say'st is as true as the gospel, for all that."

"That it is, as sure as eggs are eggs," added the dame, into whose mind conviction had been entering a little more quickly than into that of her husband.

"There now!" exclaimed Dick, springing from his seat, and feeling proud of the power of his argumentation, when he saw both the farmer and his wife brought over so triumphantly to his side of the question. "There now, you see, Kiah Dobson, a man may be judged very wrongly, and be condemned for a thief and a rogue by many who are either—saving your presence, farmer—thorough fools or rogues themselves, and yet, all the while, he may be quite as honest as his neighbours. Now, don't you think it hard, Kiah, under all the circumstances, that _you_ are not allowed to kill a hare when you like?"

"I'm not thinking so much about that," replied Farmer Dobson, his eyes still bent very thoughtfully downward—"I'm not thinking so much about that, as I am wondering how, in the name of Old Nick, these things came to be as they are. You see, Dick, it was the same in my father's time, though I've heard him say that my grandfather used to tell how, in the time of the great troubles, folks killed game when and where they liked; but that was only owing to the unsettled state of things, for these laws about the game were made before that time I take it, Dick."

"According to what I've learned about it," said Dick, looking still more proud than before, and feeling himself superior in information to the rest of the company, "these Game Laws, as they are called, began with William the Conqueror, the king that I dare say you've heard of, farmer, that came from beyond the sea, and got possession of this country, when——"

"Likely, likely," said the farmer, yawning, and growing wearied of Dick's learning; "I don't care two straws who first made such laws, Dick; but I'm sure of one thing—that it must be wrong, when one thinks on it, that the great folk should claim the wild creatures God Almighty makes himself as their own, when, all the while, they have no more right to 'em than other folk."

"To be sure it's wrong, farmer," said Dick. "What right could any man have, whether he were a king, or a 'squire, or a parson, to say to all the people of this country, or any other country, 'You shall none of you kill a stag, or a hare, or a pheasant, under pain of losing a hand, or going to prison?' The only wonder is, farmer, that people have submitted to these laws so long and so quietly."