The peculiar feature of Mrs. Sandboys’ mind was to magnify the mildest trifles into violent catastrophes. If a China shepherdess, or porcelain Prince Albert, were broken, she took it almost as much to heart as if a baby had been killed. Washing, to her, was almost a sacred ceremony, the day being invariably accompanied with fasts. Her beds were white as the opposite waters of “Sour Milk Gill;” and the brightness of the brass hobs in the keeping-room at Hassness were brilliant tablets to record her domestic virtues. She was perpetually waging war with cobwebs, and, though naturally of a strong turn of mind, the only time she had been known to faint was, when the only flea ever seen in Hassness House made its appearance full in the front of Cursty Sandboys’ shirt, at his dinner, for the celebration of a Sheep-Shearing Prize. If her husband dreaded visiting London on account of its iniquities, she was deterred by the Cumberland legend of its bugs—for, to her rural mind, the people of the Great Metropolis seemed to be as much preyed upon by these vermin, as the natives of India by the white ants—and it was a conviction firmly implanted in her bosom, that if she once trusted herself in a London four-post, there would be nothing left of her in the morning but her nightcap. The son and daughter of this hopeful pair were mere common-place creatures. The boy, Jobby, as Joseph is familiarly called in Cumberland, had just shot up into hobbledehoyhood, and was long and thin, as if Nature had drawn him, like a telescope, out of his boots. Though almost a man in stature, he was still a boy in tastes, and full of life and activity—ever, to his mother’s horror, tearing his clothes in climbing the craigs for starlings and magpies, or ransacking the hedges for “spinks” and “skopps;” or else he terrified her by remaining out on the lake long past dusk, in a boat, or delighting to go up into the fells after the sheep, when overblown by the winter’s snow. His mother declared, after the ancient maternal fashion, that it was impossible to keep that boy clean, and however he wore out his clothes and shoes was more than she could tell. The pockets of the youth—of which she occasionally insisted on seeing the contents—will best show his character to the discerning reader; these usually proved to comprise gentles, oat-cake, a leather sucker, percussion caps, a short pipe, (for, truth to say, the youth was studying this great art of modern manhood), a few remaining blaeberries, a Jew’s-harp, a lump of cobbler’s wax, a small coil of shining gut, with fish-hooks at the end, a charge or two of shot, the Cumberland Songster, a many-bladed knife with cork-screw, horsepicker, and saw at the back, together with a small mass of paste, swarming with thin red worms, tied up in one of his sister’s best cambric pocket-handkerchiefs.