tion that he ever received from others. For the
rest he was self-taught. He had a natural passion for knowledge and he
displayed wonderful industry in its acquisition. When sixteen years old
he knew something of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and later he made himself
acquainted with Chaldaic and Arabic. His occupation, up to this time,
was that of assistant to his father, the gardener; but about 1720 he was
employed in London as a clerk to a merchant, Mr. Christopher Blackett, a
relative to his father's patron, Sir Edward. He did not remain there
long. A serious illness prostrated him, and on recovering he returned to
Nidderdale, with which romantic region his fate was to be forever
associated. He now became a tutor, and not long after he was employed as
such at a manor-house, near Ramsgill, called Gowthwaite Hall, a
residence built early in the seventeenth century by Sir John Yorke, and
long inhabited by his descendants. While living there he met and courted
Anna Spance, the daughter of a farmer, at the lonely village of
Lofthouse, and in 1731 he married her. The Middlesmoor registry contains
the record of this marriage, and of the baptism and death of their first
child. In 1734 Eugene Aram removed to Knaresborough, where he kept a
school. He had, all this while, sedulously pursued his studies, and he
now was a scholar of extraordinary acquirements, not only in the
languages but in botany, heraldry, and many other branches of learning.
His life seemed fair and his future bright: but a change was at hand.
He had not resided long at Knaresborough before he became acquainted
with three persons most unlike himself in every way. These men were
Henry Terry, Richard Houseman, and Daniel Clarke. Houseman was a
flax-dresser. Clarke was a travelling jeweller. All of them were
intemperate; and it is supposed that the beginning of Eugene Aram's
downfall was the appetite for drink. The confederacy that he formed with
these men is not easily explicable, and probably it never has been
rightly explained. The accepted statement is that it was a confederacy
for fraud and theft. Clarke was reported to be the heir presumptive to a
large fortune. He purchased goods, was punctual in his payments, and
established his credit. He was supposed to be making purchases for a
merchant in London. He dealt largely in gold and silver plate and in
watches, and soon he made a liberal use of his credit to accumulate
valuable objects. In 1744 he disappeared, an