The Project Gutenberg eBook, Adventures and Recollections, by Bill o'th'
Hoylus End

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Title: Adventures and Recollections

Author: Bill o'th' Hoylus End

Release Date: June 9, 2009 [eBook #29085]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ADVENTURES AND RECOLLECTIONS***

Transcribed by Steven Wood from the Keighley Herald (1893).

ADVENTURES and RECOLLECTIONS
OF
BILL O'TH HOYLUS END.

* * * * *

TOLD BY HIMSELF.

* * * * *

CHAPTER I. {1}

[Bill o'th Hoylus End might be termed a local Will-o'th-Wisp. He has been
everything by turns, and nothing long. Now, a lean faced lad, "a mere
anatomy, a mountebank, a thread bare juggler, a needy, hollow-ey'd, sharp
looking wretch;" now acting the pert, bragging youth, telling quaint
stories, and up to a thousand raw tricks; now tumbling and adventuring
into manhood with yet the oil and fire and force of youth too strong for
reason's sober guidance; and now--well and now--finding the checks of
time have begun to grapple him, he looks back upon the past and tells his
curious stories o'er again. Verily, as Shakespeare declares in _All's
Well_, "the web of his life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together;"
and through it all there is a kind of history, just as

"There is a history in all men's lives,
Figuring the nature of the times deceased."

This son of Mischief, Art and Guile has stooped to many things but to
conquer himself and be his own best friend; that is, according to the
conception of the ordinary, respectable, get-on folk of the world. He has
followed more or less the wild, shifting impulses of his nature--restless
and reckless, if aimless and harmless; fickle and passionate, if
rebelliously natural; exhausting his youth and manhood in fruitless
action, and devoting the moments of reflection to the playful current of
the muse's fancy, forsooth, to the delectation of the more prosaic
humanity in this his locality. A life of p