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A fine young man, in the neighbouring village of Ferry-hill, had been severely bitten by a cat, and he died raving mad. On the day that we got this information from Timothy Pickering, the carpenter at Tudhoe, I was on the prowl for adventures, and in passing through Mr. Storey’s back kitchen, his big black cat came up to me.
Storey himself supplying an extra treat of fruit, cakes, and tea. “Tudhoe had her own ghosts and spectres, just as the neighbouring villages had theirs. One was the Tudhoe mouse, well known and often seen in every house in the village; but I cannot affirm that I myself ever saw it. It was an enormous mouse, of a dark brown colour, and did an immensity of mischief.
Warne’s edition of his “Natural History Essays.” The honourable character of the schoolmaster, and the simple, adventurous disposition of his pupil, are vividly depicted in this account. The following quotations from it show that preparatory schools were less luxurious in the last century than they commonly are at the present day:— “But now let me enter into the minutiæ of Tudhoe School. Mr.
Whilst I was tickling its bushy tail, it turned round upon me, and gave me a severe bite in the calf of the leg. This I kept a profound secret, but I was quite sure I should go mad every day, for many months afterwards. “There was a blacksmith’s shop leading down the village to Tudhoe Old Hall. Just opposite this shop was a pond, on the other side of the road.
“Tudhoe has no river, a misfortune ‘valde deflendus.’ In other respects the vicinity was charming; and it afforded an ample supply of woods and hedgerow trees to insure a sufficient stock of carrion crows, jackdaws, jays, magpies, brown owls, kestrels, merlins, and sparrow-hawks, for the benefit of natural history and my own instruction and amusement.”
He was already proficient in bird’s-nesting when, in 1792, he was sent to a school kept by a Roman Catholic priest, the Reverend Arthur Storey, at Tudhoe, then a small village, five miles from Durham. Three years before his death he wrote an account of his schooldays, which is printed in the Life prefixed to Messrs.
I took up half a brick and knocked it head over heels. Mr. Storey was watching at the time from one of the upper windows; but I had not seen him, until I heard the sound of his magisterial voice. He beckoned me to his room there and then, and whipped me soundly for my pains. “Four of us scholars stayed at Tudhoe during the summer vacation, when all the rest had gone home.
In 1796 Waterton left Tudhoe school and went to Stonyhurst College in Lancashire. It was a country house of the picturesque style of King James I., which had just been made over by Mr. Weld of Lulworth to the Jesuits expelled from Liége. The country round Stonyhurst is varied by hills and streams, and there are mountains at no great distance.
But as this was Palm Sunday my execution was obligingly deferred until Monday morning. “But let us return to Tudhoe. In my time it was a peaceful, healthy farming village, and abounded in local curiosities. Just on the king’s highway, betwixt Durham and Bishop-Auckland, and one field from the school, there stood a public-house called the ‘White Horse,’ and kept by a man of the name of Charlton.
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