Lavengro George Borrow (free ebook reader for ipad TXT) 📖

the north, and in the Edda, a collection of mythologic and heroic songs. In these poems we read that such and such a king invaded Norway with a gang of heroes; or so-and-so, for example, Erik Bloodaxe,320 was admitted to the set of gods; but at present gang and set are merely applied to the vilest of the vile, and the lowest of the low⁠—we say a gang of thieves and shorters, or a set of authors. How touching is this debasement of words in the course of time; it puts me in mind of the decay of old houses and names. I have known a Mortimer who was a hedger and ditcher, a Berners who was born in a workhouse, and a descendant of the De Burghs, who bore the falcon, mending old kettles, and making horse and pony shoes in a dingle.”

“Odd enough,” said the jockey; “but you were saying you knew one Berners⁠—man or woman? I would ask.”

“A woman,” said I.

“What might her Christian name be?” said the jockey.

“It is not to be mentioned lightly,” said I with a sigh.

“I shouldn’t wonder if it were Isopel,” said the jockey with an arch glance of his one brilliant eye.

“It was Isopel,” said I; “did you know Isopel Berners?”

“Aye, and have reason to know her,” said the jockey, putting his hand into his left waistcoat pocket, as if to feel for something, “for she gave me what I believe few men could do⁠—a most confounded whopping. But now, Mr. Romany Rye, I have again to tell you that I don’t like to be interrupted when I’m speaking, and to add that if you break in upon me a third time, you and I shall quarrel.”

“Pray, proceed with your story,” said I; “I will not interrupt you again.”

“Good!” said the jockey. “Where was I? Oh, with a set of people who had given up their minds to shortening! Reducing the coin, though rather a lucrative, was a very dangerous trade. Coin filed felt rough to the touch; coin clipped could be easily detected by the eye; and as for coin reduced by aquafortis, it was generally so discoloured that, unless a great deal of pains was used to polish it, people were apt to stare at it in a strange manner, and to say: ‘What have they been doing to this here gold?’ My grandfather, as I said before, was connected with a gang of shorters, and sometimes shortened money, and at other times passed off what had been shortened by other gentry.

“Passing off what had been shortened by others was his ruin; for once, in trying to pass off a broad piece which had been laid in aquafortis for four-and-twenty hours, and was very black, not having been properly rectified, he was stopped and searched, and other reduced coins being found about him, and in his lodgings, he was committed to prison, tried and executed. He was offered his life, provided he would betray his comrades; but he told the bigwigs, who wanted him to do so, that he would see them farther first, and died at Tyburn, amidst the cheers of the populace, leaving my grandmother and father, to whom he had always been a kind husband and parent⁠—for, setting aside the crime for which he suffered, he was a moral man⁠—leaving them, I say, to bewail his irreparable loss.

“ ’Tis said that misfortune never comes alone; this is, however, not always the case. Shortly after my grandfather’s misfortune, as my grandmother and her son were living in great misery in Spitalfields, her only relation⁠—a brother from whom she had been estranged some years, on account of her marriage with my grandfather, who had been in an inferior station to herself⁠—died, leaving all his property to her and the child. This property consisted of a farm of about a hundred acres, with its stock, and some money besides. My grandmother, who knew something of business, instantly went into the country, where she farmed the property for her own benefit and that of her son, to whom she gave an education suitable to a person in his condition, till he was old enough to manage the farm himself. Shortly after the young man came of age, my grandmother died, and my father, in about a year, married the daughter of a farmer, from whom he expected some little fortune, but who very much deceived him, becoming a bankrupt almost immediately after the marriage of his daughter, and himself and family going to the workhouse.

“My mother, however, made my father an excellent wife; and if my father in the long run did not do well it was no fault of hers. My father was not a bad man by nature; he was of an easy, generous temper⁠—the most unfortunate temper, by the by, for success in this life that any person can be possessed of, as those who have it are almost sure to be made dupes of by the designing. But, though easy and generous, he was anything but a fool; he had a quick and witty tongue of his own when he chose to exert it, and woe be to those who insulted him openly, for there was not a better boxer in the whole country round. My parents were married several years before I came into the world, who was their first and only child. I may be called an unfortunate creature; I was born with this beam or scale on my left eye, which does not allow me to see with it; and though I can see tolerably sharply with the other, indeed more than most people can with both of theirs, it is a great misfortune not to have two eyes like other people. Moreover, setting aside the affair of my eye, I had a very ugly countenance, my mouth being slightly wrung aside, and my complexion rather swarthy. In fact, I looked so queer that the gossips and neighbours, when they first saw