Jim Davis

_By_

John Masefield

For Judith






CHAPTER I

MY FIRST JOURNEY


I was born in the year 1800, in the town of Newnham-on-Severn, in
Gloucestershire. I am sure of the year, because my father always told
me that I was born at the end of the century, in the year that they
began to build the great house. The house has been finished now these
many years. The red-brick wall, which shuts its garden from the road
(and the Severn), is all covered with valerian and creeping
plants. One of my earliest memories is of the masons at work, shaping
the two great bows. I remember how my nurse used to stop to watch
them, at the corner of the road, on the green strip by the river-bank,
where the gipsies camped on the way to Gloucester horse-fair. One of
the masons was her sweetheart (Tom Farrell his name was), but he got
into bad ways, I remember, and was hanged or transported, though that