Such was the passing of Percival Reed, Keeper of Redesdale, who took with him, when at length he relinquished his charge, a humble henchman, a hind of the Rede Valley.
DANDY JIM THE PACKMAN
It was the back end of the year. The crops were all in, and but little was left of the harvest moon that had seen the Kirn safely won on the farms up "Ousenam" Water. A disjaskit creature she looked as the wind drove a scud of dark cloud across her pale face, or when she peered over the black bank below her, only to be hidden once more by an angry drift of rain. It was no night for lonely wayfarers. Oxnam and Teviot were both in spate, and their moan could be heard when the wind rested for a little and allowed the fir trees to be still. Only for very short intervals, however, did the tireless wind cease, and always, after a short respite, the trees were attacked again, and made to beck and bow their dark heads like the nodding plumes of a hearse. The road from Crailing was in places dour with mud, heavy-rutted by harvest carts, with ever and anon a great puddle that stretched across from ditch to ditch. But dismal or not dismal, the night had apparently no evil effect on the spirits of the one man who was trudging his homeward way from Crailing to Eckford.
Dandy Jim, the packman, was a young fellow who wanted more than evil weather and a dreich, black night to depress him. A fine, upstanding lad he was, with a glib English tongue that readily sold his wares, and which, along with a handsome, merry face, helped him with ease into the good graces of those whom he familiarly knew as "the lasses." Dandy Jim had had many a flirtation, but now he felt that his roving days were nearly past. He was seriously thinking of matrimony.
"She's a bonny lass," thought he contemplatively, dwelling on the charms of the young cook at the farmhouse he had left just past midnight, "bonny and thrifty, and as fond o' a laugh as I am mysel. That bit shop as ye come out o' Hexham, with red roses growing up the front o't, and fine-scented laylock bushes at the back, that would do us fine…"
And so, safely wrapped up in happy plans and in thoughts of his apple-cheeked lady-love, Jim manfully splashed through puddles and tramped through mud, conscience free, and fearful of nothing in earth or out of it. The graveyard at Eckford possessed no horrors for him. "Bogles," quoth he, "what's a bogle? I threw muckle Sandy, the wrestler, at Lammas Fair, an' pity the bogle that meddles wi' me."
But, nevertheless, Jim, glancing towards the old church with its surrounding tombstones as he went by, saw something he did not expect, and quickly checked the defiant whistle that is, somehow, an infallible aid to the courage of even the bravest. There was a light over there among the graves, a flickering light that the wind lightly tossed, and that, somehow, did not suggest likeable things, even to Dandy Jim. Stock-still he stood for a couple of minutes watching the yellow glimmer among the tombstones, and then, with grim suspicion in his mind, he walked up to the churchyard gate. Nowadays we have only an occasional "watch-tower" in an old kirkyard, or a rusted iron cage over a grass-grown grave to remind us of times when human hyænas prowled abroad after nightfall, and carried off their white, cold prey to be chaffered for by surgeons for the dissecting-rooms. But Dandy Jim's day was the day of Burke and Hare, of Dr. Knox, and of many another murderous and scientific ghoul, and a lantern's gleam in a churchyard in the small hours usually meant but one thing. As he expected, a gig stood at the churchyard gate; a bony, strong-shouldered, chestnut mare tethered to the gate-post, munching, mouth in nose-bag. In the gig was a sack, standing upright – a remarkably tall sack, five foot ten high at least, stiffly balanced against the seat.
"Aye, aye," said Jim to himself, "it was a six-foot coffin when they planted Jock the day. Him an' me was much of an age and of a height, poor lad; and here he is now, off to Edinburgh to be made mincemeat of."
But even as he thought, he acted. The mare threw up an inquiring head as she felt a light step in the gig, and a sudden lightening of her load. But the wind wailed round the church and the rain beat down, dimming the glass in the flickering lantern, and every now and then Jim could hear a pick striking against a stone or a heavy thud as of a spadeful of damp earth being beaten down. Out of the gig came the sack, and out of the sack speedily came the packman's erstwhile acquaintance, Jock. A gap in the hedge across the road conveniently accommodated Jock's unresisting body, over he went into the next field, and once again the mare started as Dandy Jim sprang into the gig with one bound and quickly struggled into the empty sack. He was only just in time. A parting clatter of pickaxe and thud of spade, a swing of the lantern, that sent a yellow light athwart some grey old headstones, rough voices and hasty steps, and two men appeared, pushed their implements into the back of the gig, released the mare from her nose-bag, clambered in, one on either side of the upright sack, and drove off at a quick trot.
For some time they proceeded in silence.
"A good haul," at last one man remarked; "a young chap – in fine condition."
"A heavy load for the little mare," said he who held the reins; "fifteen stone if he's a pound. Not an easy one to tackle afore he died for want o' breath."
Packman Jim lurched against the speaker ere the words were well out of his mouth. With an oath the man shoved him back, and Jim stiffly leaned against the seat in as nearly the attitude of the corpse, to whom he was acting as understudy, as he was able to assume. They had got a little beyond Kalefoot, and the flooded river was sending its moaning voice above the sough of the wind and the drip of the rain when one of the men spoke again to his companion. His voice was husky, and he spoke in a low tone as though he feared some eavesdropper.
"Before God, man," he said, "I can feel the body moving." The other, in his voice all the horror of a dread he had been trying to hide, answered in a shrill scream, "It's warm, I tell ye! – the corpse is warm!"
Then came Dandy Jim's opportunity. His face was white enough in the uncertain glimmer of the gig's lamps when he thrust his head out of the sack and looked first at one and then at another of his companions. In a deep and hollow voice he spoke:
"If you had been where I hae been, your body would burn too," said he.
A screech and a roar were, according to Dandy Jim, the result of his remark, and on either side of the gig a man cast himself out into the darkness, the rain, and the mud, and ran – ran – in heedless terror for an unknown sanctuary. What happened to the pair no subsequent historian has recorded, but when Dandy Jim shortly afterwards wed an apple-cheeked cook and took up his abode in a rose-covered cottage near Hexham, he no longer trudged the Border roads with a pack on his back, but drove a useful gig, drawn by a very willing, strong-shouldered, chestnut mare.
THE VAMPIRES OF BERWICK AND MELROSE
At Berwick-on-Tweed a man had died. In life he was a man of much weight, one of the wealthiest of the freemen. He did his good deeds with pomp. The devoutness of his religion was visible for every man to see, and his look of sanctity as he went to pray was surely an example and a reproach to every rough mariner whose boat was moored in the harbour beneath the walls.
But when death came to him, an evil thing befell the reputation of that holy man of means.
Those tongues that had been tied in his lifetime began to wag. The dark passages of his history, of the doors to which he had held the keys, were thrown open. And a horrified town discovered that their respected fellow-citizen had been a man of foul life, guilty of many a fraud and of many a crime, and that a dog's death had been too good a death for him. What wonder that every decent person in the town spoke of him with horror? But the horror they had of him who had so deceived them was but a little thing when compared with the hideous dread that the impostor inspired ere he had lain for a week in his grave in Berwick. Men who lived in those days had many an evil thing to dread, for wolves, ghouls, and vampires were as terribly real to them as in our day are the microbes of cancer, of fever, or of tuberculosis. And when a man who was notoriously a sinner came to his end, there was in the grave no rest for him, nor was there peace for his fellow-men. Night after night he was sure to rise from his tomb and go a-hunting for a human prey. He sucked blood, and so drained the life of the innocent clean away. He devoured human flesh. He chased his victims as though he were a mad dog, sending them crazed by his bite, or worrying and mangling them to a dreadful death.
This citizen, then, was not likely to rest in peace, and but a night or two after the earth had been heaped over his grave, he was up and out and rushing through the dark streets where his decorous footsteps had so often fallen solidly by day, so often slunk stealthily by night.
By Satan's agency he was set free, all men averred, yet the master that he had faithfully served did but little to pleasure him. For all the night through, as long as darkness lasted, the dead sinner was hunted through the deserted streets by a pack of baying hell-hounds. Round the walls, down by the quay, up Hyde Hill, through the Scots Gate, down lanes and byeways and back again round the walls – a weariful hunt it was. Thankfully must the quarry have welcomed the first streaks of light on the grey sea line, when the chase was ended and he was permitted to rest in his coffin once more.
Only the bravest durst venture out of doors after dusk, and the good people of Berwick lay a-trembling in their beds as the hunt swept past their very doors, and the blood-curdling howls of the hounds turned their hearts to water within them.
But always, in such a case, there are to be found one or two bold spirits, or one or two so heedless of what is passing around them that they rush into danger unawares. Such there were at Berwick-on-Tweed, and to them the hunted soul spoke as he fled past, the hell-hounds slavering at his heels. "Until my body is burnt," he cried, "you folk of Berwick shall have no peace!" And as they rushed for sanctuary into the nearest dwelling they fancied they could still hear the tormented wretch's shriek, shrill above the baying of the dogs – "Burn! burn! Peace! peace!"
So the people of the town took counsel together, and having solemnly concluded that "were a remedy further delayed, the atmosphere, infected and corrupted by the constant whirlings through it of the pestiferous corpse, would engender disease and death to a great extent," they resolved to follow the vampire's own suggestion. Ten young men, "renowned for boldness," were appointed to lay the Horror. They went to the grave, dug up the corpse, cut it limb from limb, then burned it until a little heap of white ash was all that remained of the man of evil life, whose shade had brought dread to all the citizens of Berwick. But their wise action must, unfortunately, have been taken too late. Very soon afterwards a great pestilence arose, and decimated the town's population. "Never did it so furiously rage elsewhere," says William, Canon of Newburgh, the learned churchman, who has chronicled for us the tale, "though it was at that time general throughout all the borders of England." According to him, the vampire had done his evil work. And as man, woman, and child were carried by night to the graves prepared for the plague-stricken, there were those who vowed they could still hear the distant sound of baying hounds, and above them the shrill scream of the man who in life had seemingly walked so godly a walk, and who had given example to the rough mariners down at the quay as he daily went to pray.
Such is the story of the vampire at Berwick, and of the way in which valiant men laid him. But the old Canon of the Austin Friars has yet another tale to tell of a vampire on the Border. Destruction by fire was not the only means of laying the unholy spirit that "walked" to the hurt of its fellow-creatures. When a suicide was buried, or when one who was a reputed witch, warlock, or were-wolf, or who had been cursed by his parents or by the church, was laid in the grave, it was always well to take the precaution of driving a stake through the body. Such a stake (in Russia an aspen) driven at one blow bereft the evil thing of all its power. Only in the reign of George IV was the custom in the case of suicides abolished. If the precaution had not been taken at burial, in all probability when the vampire had already done some harm, the corpse was exhumed and the ghastly ceremony gone through. And always, so it was declared, the body of the vampire was found with fresh cheeks and open, staring eyes, well nourished by the blood of his victims. In such condition was found the vampire of Melrose, whose tale is also told by William of Newburgh.
Many a holy man has chanted the Psalms under the arches of Melrose Abbey, but the vampire priest had never lived aught but a worldly, carnal life. He held a post that suited him well, as chaplain to a certain illustrious lady whose property lay near the Eildons, and who, so long as her Mess John performed his duties as family priest, paid no heed to his mode of occupying his time when these were performed.
The chaplain was of the type of the sporting parson of later days. He loved the hunt. He loved a good bottle, a good horse, a good dog. "The Hundeprest" was the name he went by. Other things he also loved that made not for sanctity, and when, at last, he died, his death was no more holy than his selfish, sensual life had been. No protecting aspen stake had been driven through his body, and so when he was laid to rest under the shadow of the monastery, for him rest there was none. The holy brothers inside the walls protected themselves from him, when he came a-wandering, by vigils and by prayers. The lady whose chaplain he had been was less well protected, and when, night after night, her sleep was broken by horrible groans and murmurings from a thing that always seemed just without her room, and almost about to enter, she became nearly frantic. She came to Melrose, and with tears besought the holy fathers, who owed much to her bounty, to wrestle for her in prayer and drive this evil thing away. The monks of Melrose did for her what they could. Not only did they pray, but two stout-hearted friars and two powerful young laymen all well armed were appointed to guard the grave of the lady's late chaplain, and to go on duty that very night.
It was chill autumn, and as they paced the damp grass of the graveyard there was a smell of dead leaves in the air, and a grey mist crept up from the Tweed that moaned as it bore its flooded waters to the sea. When midnight came they expected to see the Hundeprest, but midnight passed in safety, and in "the wee, sma' hours" the two laymen and one of the monks went into the nearest cottage to warm their icy feet. Now came the chance of the vampire. With "a terrible noise" the Hundeprest suddenly appeared, a thing of horror, and rushed at the monk who was slowly pacing towards the grave. The holy man bravely stood the charge, and, as the monster was almost touching him, he swung the axe which he carried, and drove it with all his might into the body of his diabolic adversary. With a groan, the vampire turned and fled away, and the friar, the tables turned, ran in pursuit until the grave of the Hundeprest was reached, and the horror vanished.
Nothing of the encounter was to be seen when the other three watchers returned, but grey dawn was near, and at the first sign of light the four men, with pick-axe and spade, opened up the grave. Even as they dug their spades turned up mingled blood and clay, and when they came to the corpse of the Hundeprest, they found it fresh as on the day he died, but with a terrible wound in the body, from which the blood still oozed away.
With horror they bore it out of sight of the monastery of which he had been so unworthy a brother. A cleansing fire burned it to ashes, and a shrewd, clean wind that blew from over the Lammermoors swept away all trace of the accursed thing. No pestilence came to Melrose. Perchance in the twelfth century it was by prayer and fasting that the holy men won the day.
A BORDER MIDDY
One blustering February evening towards the close of the eighteenth century there sat in a back room in a little inn at Portsmouth three midshipmen, forlorn-looking and depressed to a degree quite at variance with the commonly accepted idea of the normal mental condition of midshipmen. It was a room, not in the famous "Blue Posts" – that hostelry beloved by lads of their rank in the service – but in a smaller, meaner, less frequented house in a very different quarter of the town, a quarter none too savoury, if the truth were told.
Why they had betaken themselves to this particular tavern in preference to that generally used by them, who can say. Perhaps – as Peter Simple's coachman remarked on that occasion when Peter first made acquaintance with Portsmouth – perhaps it was because they had too often "forgotten to pay for their breakfastesses" at the "Blue Posts," and had not the wherewithal to pay up arrears. In any case, here they were, and, midshipman-like, during their stay they had recklessly run up a larger bill than they had means to settle. There was no possibility of following the course recommended by the drunken sailor, namely, to "cut and run," for the landlady of the inn was much too astute a personage to make that a possibility, and she had too little faith in human nature generally, and in that of midshipmen in particular, to let her consent to wait for her money till time and the end of their cruise again brought their frigate back to Portsmouth. Pay they must, by some means or other, for already the Blue Peter was flying at the fore and the Sirius would sail at daylight. If she sailed without them it was very plain that there was an end of their career in the Navy – they would be "broke." Small wonder that the three middies were in the last stage of gloom. Their entire possessions, money and clothes, could not cover one half of what they owed, and every compromise had been rejected by the obdurate landlady. Appeal to their friends was useless, for time did not admit of an answer being received before the ship sailed. And escape was hopeless, for the one window that the room possessed was heavily barred, the door carefully locked, and the key kept in the capacious pocket of the landlady.
It was the very deuce of a situation – the devil to pay and no pitch hot. Again and again as the evening wore on they discussed possibilities; again and again the same conclusion was arrived at. Hope was dead. No doubt in the end their friends might pay up, but they groaned as the certainty forced itself on them that their career at sea was as good as over. If only they had been entitled to any prize-money! But prize-money there was none, and the few guineas each had had from home had long been idly squandered.
"We're done, my boys; we're done! Oh, Lord, what swabs we have been!" cried the senior of the three with a groan, laying his head on the table.
"Oh, never say die!" said another, a cheery-faced, ruddy lad with a noticeable Scottish accent. "I've been in as tight a hole before and got out of it all right. We've a few hours yet to come and go on. Something's pretty sure to turn up."
As he spoke the key was put in the door, and in came the landlady.
"Well! wot's it goin' to be? Am I to get that there money you owes me, or am I not? You ain't got much time for shilly-shallyin', I can tell you, young gentlemen. An' paid I'm agoin' to be, one way or other."
She was a big-boned, florid, dark-eyed woman, well over thirty, somewhat inclined to be down-at-heel and slatternly, though not yet quite destitute of some small share of good looks; a woman solid of step and unattractive to the eye of youth; moreover, as they knew from recent experience, possessed of a rasping tongue.
"None o' ye got anything to say? Well, then, I'll tell you what I'm ready to do and let you go. One of you shall marry me! I don't care two straws which of you it is. But if you three're to get aboard your ship afore she sails, one of you's got to come with me to the parson this night an' be spliced. Take it or leave it; them's my terms. For the good o' my business I must 'ave a 'usband, now my old dad's gone aloft. Whether he's on the spot or not I don't care not the value of a reefer's button, so long as I can show my 'lines.' I'll give you 'alf an hour to make up your minds an' settle atween you who's goin' to be the lucky one."
And with that she left the room, again carefully locking the door and taking away the key.
Truly were they now between the devil and the deep sea. And no amount of discussion improved the prospect.
"We can't do it, you know," piteously cried one. "I'll see her shot first."
"Blest if I see any other way out of it," said another.
"And she's pretty old. She might perhaps die before we came back, mightn't she?" hopefully ventured the third.
"Oh, stow that! She's not more than forty, and she's likely to live as long as any of us."
"Well, if you won't allow that she's likely to oblige us by leaving this world, at anyrate you'll admit that there's always a goodish chance that the husband-elect may run up against a French cannonball and get out of the scrape that way. Anyhow, we've come to the end of our tether. The alternative's ruin. It's pretty black to windward, whichever way you look at it, but one way spells ruin for the lot of us; the other, at the worst, means disaster for only one. I vote we draw lots, and the man who draws the shortest lot wins – er … at least he marries the lady," said the cheery-faced boy, with rather a rueful laugh.
"You'll laugh perhaps on the wrong side of your face before all's done.
But, all right. If we must, we must. You make ready the lots, Watty, and I'll take first draw. Only, I think if the bad luck's mine, I'll slip over the side some middle watch," said the senior middy miserably.
With haggard young faces two drew, leaving the third lot to the Scottish boy.
"Thank Heaven!" cried the first, wiping his brow as he saw that his, at least, was not a short lot. "It's yours, Watty, old boy," he said to the middy from north of the Tweed.
"My God! what will my dear old mother say?" groaned the poor boy, with face grey as his own Border hills in a November drizzle. "Promise me, on your honour, both of you, to keep this miserable business a dead secret for ever… Well, I've got to face it. Bring the woman in, and let's have it over and get aboard."
Watty Scott was a scion of a good Scottish Border family, a youth careless and harum-scarum as the most typical of middies, but a gentleman, and popular alike with officers and men. He was about eighteen, had already distinguished himself in more than one brush with the enemy, and was looked on as a most promising officer. But now…!
"Oh, little did my mother ken,
The day she cradled me,"
(might he have wailed), in what dire scrape the recklessness inherent in her boy would land him.
"I thought you'd take my terms," said the landlady, when she came into the room. "Faith! an' I've got the pick o' the basket! Well, come along, my joker; we'll be off to the parson. But you'll take my arm all the way, d'ye see! – as is right an' nat'ral for bride and bridegroom. You ain't agoin' to give me the slip afore the knot's tied, I can tell you. Not if I knows it, young man."
Broken clergymen, broken by drink or what not, ready to go through anything for a consideration, were never hard to find in those days in a town such as Portsmouth, and all too soon the ceremony, binding enough, so far as Watty could see, was over. Then the new-made wife insisted, before the three lads left her, that she should stand them a good dinner, and as much wine as they cared to drink to the health of bride and bridegroom.
"An' now," she said to her husband ere the youngsters departed, "I aint agoin' to send my man to sea with empty pockets. Put that in your purse!"
But Watty would have none of the five guineas she tried to force on him.
"Well, I think none the worse of you for that," she cried. "Come, give us a kiss, at anyrate." And with a shudder Watty Scott saluted his bride.
Never did the grey waters of the English Channel look more cheerless than they appeared to one unhappy midshipman of H.M.S. Sirius next morning, as the frigate beat down channel in the teeth of a strong westerly breeze; never before had life seemed to him a thing purposeless and void of hope. "To have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part." The words rang in his ears still, with a solemnity that even the red-nosed, snuffy, broken-down parson who hiccuped through the service had not been able to kill. But, God! the irony of the thing – the ghastly mockery! To love and to cherish till death us do part! Verily, the iron entered into his soul; day and night the hideous burden crushed him. The castles in the air that, boylike, he had builded were crumbled into dust. Was this the end of all his dreams? Well, at least there was that friendly cannon-ball to be prayed for, or a French cutlass or pike in some boat expedition, if the Fates were kind.
The frigate's orders were – Halifax with despatches; thereafter, the West India Station for an indefinite time. Six or eight weeks at Halifax, varied by some knocking about off the Nova Scotia coast, did not tend to relax Watty's depression, but rather the contrary. For just before the frigate took her departure from those latitudes a lately received Portsmouth journal which reached the midshipmen's berth had recorded the arrest on a serious charge of, amongst others, a woman giving her name as "Mrs. Walter Scott, licensee of the Goat's Head Tavern, Portsmouth." Now the Goat's Head Tavern was that little inn where in an evil moment the three lads had taken up their abode before the sailing of the Sirius, and to Watty it appeared as if his disgrace must now be spread abroad by the four winds of heaven.
It was mental relief to get away out to sea, and to feel that now at least there was again some probability of the excitement of an action. To Bermuda, thence to Jamaica, were the orders; and surely in no part of the world was a ship of war more certain of active employment. Those were days removed by no great number of years from Rodney's famous victory over de Grasse, and not yet had we completed the reduction of the French West India Islands; the greatest glutton of fighting could scarce fail to have his fill.
One night, after the frigate had left Bermuda, it had come on to blow desperately hard from the north-west, and with every hour the gale increased, till at length – when sail after sail, thundering and threshing, had come in – the ship lay almost under bare poles, straining in every timber and nosing her weather bow into the mountainous seas that swept by at intervals, ere they roared away into the murk to leeward.
It was the middle watch, and Watty had been standing for some time holding on by the lee mizzen rigging, peering eagerly into the darkness.
"I've thought two or three times, sir, that I can see something to leeward of us," he reported to the officer of the watch.
And presently the "something" – a mere patch of denser black in a darkness emphasized more than relieved by the grey-white crests of breaking seas – resolved itself into a large vessel, which as day broke was seen to be a frigate, like themselves under the shortest of canvas, and with all possible top-hamper down on deck. Pitching and rolling heavily, she lay; sometimes, as a sea struck her, half buried in a grey-green mountain of foam and flying spray that left her spouting cascades of water from her scuppers; one moment, as she rose, heaving her fore-foot clean out of the water, showing the glint of the copper on her bottom; the next, plunging wildly down, till some mighty billow, roaring aloft between the vessels, hid each from the other's ken as effectually as if the ocean had swallowed them.
The stranger had hoisted French colours, and the Sirius beat to quarters. But as far as possibility of engaging was concerned, the ships might have been a hundred leagues apart: the sea ran far too high. And so there all day they lay, impotent to harm each other.
When grey dawn came on the second morning, bringing with it weather more moderate, the French frigate was seen under easy sail far to leeward, evidently repairing damage aloft, and, in spite of every effort on the part of the Sirius, it was late afternoon ere the first shot was fired.
Darkness had begun to fall as the French ship struck her colours after a bloody action in which her losses mounted to over one hundred men, including her captain and several officers. In less degree the Sirius suffered; and of those who fell, Watty was one. Early in the engagement he was carried below, badly torn by a severe and dangerous splinter wound in the head.
"There goes poor Watty – out of his trouble, anyhow," cried one of the three friends.
Thereafter, the life in him hovered long 'twixt this world and the next, and weeks passed ere, in the house of a friend at Kingston, Jamaica, he came once more to his full senses. Even then his progress was but dilatory.
"I can't make the boy out," said his doctor. "He ought to get well now. Yet he doesn't. Doesn't seem to make an effort, somehow. If he was a bit older you'd think he didn't want to live. It's not natural. If he were to get any little complication now, he'd go."
And so the listless weeks dragged on, and it was but a ghost of the once merry boy that each morning crept wearily and with infinite labour from his room to the wide, pleasant verandah. And there he would pass his days, vacantly listening with dull ears to the cool sea-breeze whispering through the trees, or brooding over his misery. Sometimes, in his weak state, tears of self-pity would roll unheeded down his cheeks; he pined for the heather of his native hills, for the murmur of Tweed and Teviot, and for the faces of his own people. Never again could the happiness be his to live once more in the dearly loved Border land; for how could he face home when that terrible fate awaited his landing at Portsmouth. "Oh! why had he been guilty of folly so great? Why had he thus made a shipwreck of life's voyage almost at its very outset?"