Metcalfe now had to amuse himself in some other way, and as many of his friends used to meet every evening in order to bathe in the pools of the river Nidd, he would not be left behind, and persuaded one of them to teach him to swim and dive. Of course, all those things would have been impossible if he had been the least nervous or frightened, but Blind Jack did not know what fear was of any earthly thing. At least he had thought at the time that the voice and the lights in the church were ghostly, and _anybody_ might be afraid of ghostly manifestations. But with the air and the shouts of other boys about him, he was as brave as a lion, and soon could swim farther and dive deeper than any of them. The Nidd is one of those rivers which easily rise and fall, and it is full of 'holes,' as they are called, where the water swirls and eddies, and whatever is swept over them by the current always stops for a moment and then slowly sinks. In some strange way which was never explained by him, Jack contrived to reach these holes without being drawn into the eddies, and it quickly became a regular trade with him to rescue with the aid of a hooked stick anything which had sunk in the pool. In this way he drew up several pieces of valuable wood, a quantity of wool swept into the river by a sudden flood, and even the body of a drowned man. * * * * * Jack was now about fifteen and was famous throughout Knaresborough, which had grown quite proud of him. He had continued to practise his violin, and everybody declared that never were country-dances danced with such spirit as when Jack was the fiddler. So very speedily he got an engagement as one of a band of four musicians to appear at the Assembly Rooms once a fortnight, where a ball was given, and was invited besides to many other places round about. In this very year too, 1732, he was offered the post of fiddler at Harrogate, for the old man who had held it for seventy years, and was now a hundred, could no longer play briskly enough to please the young people. Jack's only assistant was a boy younger than himself, whom he took about everywhere. Perhaps they both rode pillion--that is, one behind the other; for Jack had saved up his earnings and bought a horse, of which he was very fond. On its back he was to be seen at Ripon or Boroughbridge or many other towns, and when people were tired of giving balls, Metcalfe would run his horse at the small races, of which there are so many in Yorkshire. Here he met with some of the gentlemen who lived in the neighbourhood, and as they all admired the cleverness and courage with which he had triumphed over his blindness, and found him besides an amusing companion, they made friends with him and sometimes invited him to stay in their houses and hunt with them. To Mr. Barlow, of Middleton near York, he once paid a visit of six months, and while there became acquainted with a