Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, Vol. 1 (of 2)

We had yet ten or eleven miles to travel, and no food with us. William lay under the wind in a corn-field below the house, being not well enough to partake of the milk and bread. Coleridge gave our host a pamphlet, "The Crisis of the Sugar Colonies"; he was well acquainted with Burns's poems. There was a politeness and a manly freedom in this man's manners which pleased me very much. He told us that he had served a gentleman, a captain in the army--he did not know who he was, for none of his relations had ever come to see him, but he used to receive many letters--that he had lived near Dumfries till they would let him stay no longer, he made such havoc with the game; his whole delight from morning till night, and the long year through, was in field sports; he would be on his feet the worst days in winter, and wade through snow up to the middle after his game. If he had company he was in tortures till they were gone; he would then throw off his coat and put on an old jacket not worth half-a-crown. He drank his bottle of wine every day, and two if he had better sport than usual. Ladies sometimes came to stay with his wife, and he often carried them out in an Irish jaunting-car, and if they vexed him he would choose the dirtiest roads possible, and spoil their clothes by jumping in and out of the car, and treading upon them. "But for all that"--and so he ended all--"he was a good fellow, and a clever fellow, and he liked him well." He would have ten or a dozen hares in the larder at once, he half maintained his family with game, and he himself was very fond of eating of the spoil--unusual with true heart-and-soul sportsmen.