University of Virginia Library

12. CHAPTER XII.
Robin Day meets an alarming adventure, and stumbles upon a
companion in misfortune.

And now behold me upon the world alone, a hero
of eighteen, with just such qualifications for making
my way through the stormy paths of life as one
might expect in a cockboat for performing a voyage
round Cape Horn.

It is true, I entertained—or had done so, until the
affairs of the night had frighted it out of me—the
best possible opinion of my own merits and abilities;
and such complacent self-regard, it is conceded on
all sides, is the best foundation and prognostic of
worldly success. I had trounced all my school-mates,
(General Dicky Dare, my friend and confederate,
though my rival, only excepted;) and it was
but a natural consequence that I should suppose
myself able in like manner to conquer all mankind;
and the share I had had in demolishing the power
and pretensions of the tyrants of the academy, had
convinced me I possessed the same ability to resist
the oppressions of the great men of the world, the
kings and presidents; of whom I entertained a very
mean opinion, believing they were only Burleys and
M'Goggins on a larger scale.

Besides this generous sense of my own merits, I
possessed another qualification thought to be of

almost equal efficacy in helping one through the
world; namely, a good personal appearance; for, from
having been the ugliest little imp in the world, I
was now grown, as my looking-glass told me, quite
a handsome young fellow, with black eyes and hair
—the latter very curling and glossy, and, indeed,
the admiration of all the young ladies in the town,
as well as myself, and a figure that, in the main,
satisfied my own predilections; there being no fault
I could find, except that I was a thought shorter than
was necessary, and my complexion somewhat more
tawny than suited my ideas of perfect beauty.

This vanity and self conceit, as the reader may
properly esteem it, I know not whether I owed in
greater part to a natural spirit of coxcombry, or
to the uncommon indulgences I had so suddenly
fallen heir to in my patron's family; which were
enough to turn the brain of one to whom indulgences
had been before wholly unknown. But, at all
events, the foible was never strong enough to throw
me open to remark; and, as I have mentioned, the
catastrophe of the night had banished it from my
breast, at least, for a time; so that I certainly derived
no advantage from it in what may be properly
considered my outset in life.

My other qualifications for the great strife of the
world, were neither many nor striking. I had acquired,
during my five years at the academy, the
ordinary rudiments of education, besides “a little
Latin,” as the crabbed Ben Jonson disparagingly
said of his great superior, “and less Greek;” to
which I managed to add, during the few months I
was ensconced in my patron's office, a little French,
a knowledge of pestles and mortars, and the knack
of pulling out easy grinders. I had picked up some

bad Spanish from the cook, and from the coachman,
the art of riding and spoiling a horse. A French
barber had taught me to dance; and I learned to
squeak upon a cracked flute from the impulse of my
own genius; which even impelled me to the frenzy
of attempting the fiddle; whose mellifluous tones I
dispensed among pill-boxes and swinging bones, until
my preceptor, disgusted at my music and inattention
to what he esteemed my proper duties,
advised me, if I wished to play the fiddle, to draw
the bow over my own head—a sarcasm that ended
my violining on the instant.

What other qualifications I may have possessed
I am ignorant of—except, indeed, an uncommonly
good and strong constitution, capable of enduring
all exposures and hardships; and this was, I believe,
after all, the only one on which I ought to have
placed any reliance. I was, in short, an ignorant
youth, a great schoolboy entirely incompetent to
the task of self-management or self-preservation;
and my benefactor had acted with wisdom in assigning
me to a situation, wherein, besides enjoying
security from the vengeance of the law, which was
the first object to be aimed at, I should not be left
to the dangerous duty of taking care of myself.

I rode with great speed, for the first two or three
miles, being all the while in terrible fear of pursuit;
but, by and by, I slackened a little in my gait, the
night being still very dark and gusty, and the road,
like all other roads in New Jersey, intolerably rough
and dangerous. As my fears subsided, my griefs
began to usurp their place; and the thought of my forlornness
and banishment—of my benefactor, whom
I loved well, and of Nanna whom, I discovered, I
loved still better, both now lost to me, and perhaps
for ever—weighed so heavily upon my heart, that I

gave myself up to despair, and lamented my fate with
floods of tears. In this melancholy employment I continued
a mile further; and would perhaps have continued
all night, had it not been for an incident that
presently befell, and aroused a multitude of other
feelings.

I had arrived at a place, where, at the bottom of a
slaty hill, a by-road, that came in a roundabout way
from the town, joined, and terminated in, the highway
upon which I was travelling; and the hill being
pretty bare, for it was a barren, dreary place, so as
to offer no obstacle to the transmission of sounds,
and the winds lulling at the time, I was made sensible,
first, by the animation and snorting of my steed,
Bay Tom, and then by the surer evidence of my
own ears, that a horseman was upon the by-road,
descending the hill, and at as round a trot as myself.
This discovery filled me with confusion, for I did
not doubt it was one of the many pursuers, who
were, in all probability, by this time, scouring the
country in search of me.

Afraid to turn back, as that would be only to rush
into the hands of, perhaps, a whole band of constables
and deputy sheriffs from the town, and relying
upon the speed of Bay Tom, who was of good blood,
and had a genealogy ten times longer than my own,
I increased my pace, in the hopes of getting beyond
the by-road, before the enemy had left it: after
which, I intended to show him as clean a pair of
heels as possible.

To my dismay, the stranger increased his pace in
like manner; and the thunder of his hoofs, which
grew louder and louder every moment, as the roads
converged nigher together, shook the hill. It was
plain he was riding as furiously as myself, determined
to get before me to the bottom of the hill, and so intercept

me. I spurred the harder: the enemy did
the same; and both came thundering together at the
meeting of the roads; where my terror, which was
now mounted to a pitch of perfect ecstasy, was completed
by the bloody-minded villain flashing a pistol
in my face, and exclaiming with a voice of fury and
desperation—“Death before dishonour! I won't be
taken alive!”

The flash of the pistol brought my horse upon his
hams, frightened out of his wits, as I was out of
mine; but judge my astonishment when I recognised
in these terrible tones, the voice of my friend Dicky
Dare! who, a fugitive like myself, and, like myself,
prepared to see in every body an emissary of justice,
had made precisely the same mistake I had done,
had taken me for a deputy sheriff, as I had taken
him, had aimed, and sorely striven, to be first in at
the meeting of the roads, with the same intention of
escape; and finding himself, as I had done, intercepted
and caught, had, very unlike me, resolved to sell
his life dear, and so came within an ace of blowing
my brains out.

“Dicky Dare!” cried I.

“Sy Tough!” quoth he.

These were our exclamations; and, the next moment,
we burst into a roar of laughter, in which,
fright, sorrow, and every thing else, save the ridiculousness
of the rencounter, was for a while entirely
forgotten.

Having exercised our lungs in this way until the
humour of merriment was satisfied, we came to a
mutual explanation; and I found that General Dicky
was, like myself, an outcast and exile, cast upon the
world to seek his fortune—that we were brothers in
distress, as we had been in mischief.

He, it seemed, after retiring from the battleground,

had made his way home; though without
any preliminary visit to the fields, or dip in a ditch;
and not without some doubts, as he confessed, as to
“what the lawyers would think of the matter;”
which grew the more strongly upon him, when, presently,
a friend of his father, Captain Dare, suddenly
broke in with the fatal intelligence of M'Goggin's
being at the point of death, the application for the
warrants, &c.; whereupon the father, eyeing his promising
heir for a moment with ire and indignation,
at last roared out—“D— your blood, if you're so
good at killing, go kill the enemies of your country!”
An injunction worthy of a Roman or Spartan, which
was followed by Captain Dare giving him a horse, a
sorrel nag of no great value, greatly inferior, indeed,
to my own blooded charger, a hanger, and pair of
pistols; to which he added a small supply of money
—an article that the gratitude of the Republic took
good care he should never be greatly overburthened
with—and then ordered him to be gone to the nearest
army, to “fight like a bulldog, and, if need should
be, to die like one.”

This was exactly the thing for General Dicky,
whose soul was as eager for conflict as a young
charger's, and “smelt the battle afar off, the thunder
of the captains, and the shouting;” and who, in fact,
from all I could discover, seemed to look upon the
killing of M'Goggin as the happiest act of his life,
inasmuch as it was to that alone he owed the gratification
of his dearest hope and most enthusiastic desire;
that is, to which he would owe it, provided he
should be so happy as to escape the harpies of the
law, of whom he was in some dread, as his late
transports had made manifest.