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Untitled Article
brance ; but I can yet see a clear moonlight frosty night , as I peep through the canvass curtains of a loaded waggon , the broad wheels of which , groan and squeak as they slowly revolve , and with their weight crush the crisp earth and young ice , that crackles and jingles beneath the pressure , on a road , which to me seems as smooth as the sanded
floor of our home . A sheet of hoar covers an expanse of level country , intersected by hedges and dotted with trees , sparkling with rime , as far as the eye can reach on either side , and in the distance from the tail of the waggon , whence the survey is made—but there are no hills ! and I wept . They were the first tears of thought I ever shed . In a few days we were settled down at , how unlike the place I
had left ! But my nature , or iny disposition , renders change of residence no great evil ; I began early to love variety of place ; still without forgetting that Education was a matter of course ; and I was sent to share the wisdom and learning of a dame at her establishment , on the charges of some three-pence per week . Such was my ** preparatory school for young gentlemen . " Her first efforts were to make me sit still ,
but there she utterly failed , as has every one of my instructors since , except a yellow fever in Demerara : he mastered me . An easier toil she found in teaching me to forget my native tongue , and substituting something which required all my father ' s leisure moments to unteach me . This unravelling every evening the web which had been spun during the day , did not hit his views of education , so I was packed off to JVT—— ,
in W shire , where I had a glorious common to scamper over , trees to climb on its borders , orchards to rob , and birds' nests to hunt . And , what was a strange amusement for a child , wasps' nests to demolish in many a bank , but the rascals made me pay dearly for the fun ;—served me right , why did I meddle with them ? At eight years of age , I possessed ten times as much physical daring as is my whole stock
of either kind now . In vain was I sent home with blinded eyes and swollen nostrils , and every part of my face and neck , hands and wrists festering under the stings of the enraged yellow jackets ; I was sure to be up in the morning , and away to the field of strife , alone too , that is to say , / had no one to help me in this amusement ; I chose to go alone , and preferred doing so to having company , yet I was not
averse to associates on other occasions . Now , it I see a wasp colony , I take a ' broad sheer' of some twenty or forty yards out of my course to avoid them . Then I knew the habits of every one of the feathered tribe in the country , from the kite to the wren , and could find you the best growth of apples , nuts , and blackberries , within a circuit of six miles . I have lost my ornithology entirely . Orchards I dare not rob , it is not now a bailable offence . But the common !—
I saw it three years ago , ( I am writing in 1832 , ) and , God be praised it is not civilized . - There is nothing in the whole range of English scenery , no beauty nor ornament , neither natural nor artificial glory among all its delicious and enchanting variety , that glads my eyes and heart so fully , and so instantaneously , as a common of gorse bush
and fern ! Turn Blenheim into a potatoe garden , make brick-fields of the bed of Windermere , throw the fragments of Spitalfields , Whitechapel , the Tower , and the Horse Guards , into the Wye , but do not touch the gorse bush and fern commons . Sheep were on this common , descendants in the tenth generation , perhapi , of my old friends ,
Untitled Article
A utobiography of Pel . Verjuice . 333
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), May 2, 1833, page 333, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2614/page/45/
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