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The Project Gutenberg eBook, Adventures and Recollections, by Bill o'th' Hoylus End This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: Adventures and Recollections Author: Bill o'th' Hoylus End Release Date: June 9, 2009 [eBook #29085] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII) ***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ADVENTURES AND RECOLLECTIONS*** Transcribed by Steven Wood from the Keighley Herald (1893). ADVENTURES and RECOLLECTIONS OF BILL O'TH HOYLUS END. * * * * * TOLD BY HIMSELF. * * * * * CHAPTER I. {1} [Bill o'th Hoylus End might be termed a local Will-o'th-Wisp. He has been everything by turns, and nothing long. Now, a lean faced lad, "a mere anatomy, a mountebank, a thread bare juggler, a needy, hollow-ey'd, sharp looking wretch;" now acting the pert, bragging youth, telling quaint stories, and up to a thousand raw tricks; now tumbling and adventuring into manhood with yet the oil and fire and force of youth too strong for reason's sober guidance; and now--well and now--finding the checks of time have begun to grapple him, he looks back upon the past and tells his curious stories o'er again. Verily, as Shakespeare declares in _All's Well_, "the web of his life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together;" and through it all there is a kind of history, just as "There is a history in all men's lives, Figuring the nature of the times deceased." This son of Mischief, Art and Guile has stooped to many things but to conquer himself and be his own best friend; that is, according to the conception of the ordinary, respectable, get-on folk of the world. He has followed more or less the wild, shifting impulses of his nature--restless and reckless, if aimless and harmless; fickle and passionate, if rebelliously natural; exhausting his youth and manhood in fruitless action, and devoting the moments of reflection to the playful current of the muse's fancy, forsooth, to the delectation of the more prosaic humanity in this his locality. A life of p
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