partly to prevent its total dilapidation, and to preserve the
valuable hayricks and the tumble-down farm buildings from the pillage to
which unprotected property is necessarily exposed, and partly to keep
in repair the long line of boundary fence, to clean the graffages,
clear out the moat-like ditches, and see that the hollow-sounding wooden
bridges which formed the sole communication by which the hay wagons
could pass to and from the distant meadows, were in proper order
to sustain their ponderous annual load. Daniel Thorpe was the only
accredited unfeathered biped who figured in the parish books as occupant
of The Moors; nevertheless that swampy district could boast of one
other irregular and forbidden but most pertinacious inhabitant--and that
inhabitant was our hero, Jesse Cliffe.

Jesse Cliffe was a lad some fifteen or sixteen years of age--there
or thereabout; for with the exact date of his birth, although from
circumstances most easily ascertained, even the assistant-overseer did
not take the trouble to make himself acquainted. He was a parish child
born in the workhouse, the offspring of a half-witted orphan girl and a
sturdy vagrant, partly tinker, partly ballad-singer, who took good care
to disappear before the strong arm of justice, in the shape of a tardy
warrant and a halting constable, could contrive to intercept his flight.
He joined, it was said, a tribe of gipsies, to whom he was suspected to
have all along belonged; and who vanishing at the same time, accompanied
by half the linen and poultry of the neighbourhood, were never heard
of in our parts again; whilst the poor girl whom he had seduced and
abandoned, with sense enough to feel her misery, although hardly
sufficient to be responsible for the sin, fretted, moaned,
and pined--losing, she hardly knew how, the half-unconscious
light-heartedness which had almost seemed a compensation for her
deficiency of intellect, and with that light-heartedness losing also her
bodily strength, her flesh, her colour, and her appetite, until, about
a twelvemonth after the birth of her boy, she fell into a decline and
died.

Poor Jesse, born and reared in the workhouse, soon began to evince
symptoms of the peculiarities of both his parents. Half-witted like his
mother, wild and roving as his father--it was found impossible to check
his propensity to an out-of-door life.

From the moment, postponed as long as possible in such establishments,
in which he doffed the