Sir Henry, or, as I prefer to call him, my lord, treated me with the sweetest kindness, and I went with him wherever it was possible for him to take me.  At first my youthful waywardness and love of freedom—­for that is inherent in our race—­compelled him to restrain me by a string, which I sometimes pulled with such violence that my lord had to run; and on seeing us so amusing ourselves one morning, old Lord Grimthorpe, I think they called him, who was always full of good-natured chaff, cried out,—­

“Halloa, Hawkins!  What, has Jack made you his prisoner?  Ha! ha!  Hold him, Jack; don’t let him get away!”

Well, this went on for several weeks, what I think you call chaff, and at last I was allowed to go without the string.  It happened that on the very first morning when I was thus given my liberty, whom should we meet but this same old Lord Grimthorpe.

“Halloa!” he cries again—­“halloa, Hawkins!  Does your keeper let you go without being attached to a string?”

“No, no,” says my lord—­“no, no; Jack’s attached to me now.”

Thereupon dear old Grimthorpe, who loved a joke, laughed till his elbows rested on his knees as he stooped down.

“Well,” said he, “that’s good, Hawkins, very good indeed.”

On one occasion one of those country yokels who always met us at Assize towns, and got as close up to our javelin-men as they could, so that we could not only see them but indulge our other senses at the same time, seeing us get out of our carriage, said to another yokel, “I say, Bill, blarmed if the old bloke ain’t brought his dawg again—­that there fox terrier—­to go a-rattin’.”

I did not know what “rattin’” meant at that time, and did not learn it till we got to Warwick.  I thought it was rude to call my lord a “bloke,” especially in his red robes; but did not quite know what “bloke” meant, for I had seen so little of mankind.

One morning before we opened the Commission at Warwick—­I may as well come to it at once—­my lord and I went for a walk along the road that leads over the bridge by Warwick Castle towards Leamington.  There is a turning to a village which belonged to the old days, but does not seem now to belong to anything, and looks something like a rural watering-place, quiet and unexciting.  We turned down this quiet road, and came alongside a beautiful little garden covered with flowers of all kinds.

I had occasion afterwards to learn whom they belonged to; but I will tell you before we go further, so as to make the situation intelligible.  He was a countryman who used to make it his boast that he never had a day’s schooling in his life (so that he ought to have been leader of the most ignorant classes), and this made him the independent man he was towards his betters.  Then my Lady Warwick used to take notice of him, and this also gave him another lift in his own estimation.  He learnt to read in the long run, for he really had a good deal of native talent for a man, and set himself up for a politician and a something they call a philosopher, which any man can be with a pint pot in front of him, I am told, especially at a village alehouse.