Probably there is an underlying vein of the savage in all of us, but it is kept in control by the restraints of habit accumulated through generations of civilisation. Yet there it is. A quiet, well-conducted dog will sometimes disappear for a few days and nights. It has gone off on a spree, to poach on its own account. Then, when it has had its fling, it returns, and is meek, docile, and orderly as before. There is something of this in man. He becomes impatient of the trammels of ordinary life, its routine and matter-of-fact, and a hunger comes over him for a complete change, to shake off the bonds of conventionality, escape the drudgery of work, and live a free, wild life. Among many this takes the form of going to the Colonies or to Wild Africa or Western Canada, to shoot game, to camp out, and be a savage for a while. Among the artisan class it takes another form--the great army of tramps is recruited thus. The struggle to maintain a family, the dry uninteresting toil, drives the man into a fit of impatience, and he leaves his work, his wife and bairns, and becomes a wanderer; idle, moving on from place to place, never starving, never very comfortable--in dirt and idleness, and often in drink--but with no ties, and going here, there, and everywhere as he lists. Not many years ago there was a man who lived by the Devil's Dyke, on the South Downs of Sussex, in a shelter under a hedge, picking up coppers from visitors to the Dyke, dressed like Ally Sloper, but living in a manner more squalid and under a worse shelter than would be endured by most savages in the darkest parts of Africa. What his history was no one knew. It is now somewhat longer since a medical man, in an excess of impatience against civilisation, constructed for himself a hovel out of hurdles thatched with reeds, in South Devon. He lived in it, solitary, speaking to no one. Occasionally he bought a sheep and killed it, and ate it as the appetite prompted, and before it was done the meat had become putrid. At length the police interfered, the stench became intolerable in the neighbourhood, as the hovel was by the roadside. The doctor was ordered to remove, and he went no one seems to know whither. In Charles the First's time there were men living in the caves and dens of the ravines about Lydford in South Devon. They had a king over them named Richard Rowle, and they went by the name of the Gubbins. William Browne, a poet of the time, wrote in 1644:-- "The town's enclosed with desert moors, But where no bear nor lion roars, And naught can live but hogs; For all o'erturned by Noah's flood, Of fourscore miles scarce one foot's good, And hills are wholly bogs.