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The original preface contained a scurrilous reference to Fielding, against whom he printed a diatribe in a pamphlet dated the next year. The hero of the story, a handsome ne'er-do-well who has money and position to start the world with, encounters plenty of adventure in England and out of it, by land and sea.
His mother, a hardworking laundress,* whom his ne'er-do-well father had scandalously deserted, had afterwards married an honest artisan who was madly in love with her. But in spite of their endeavours, they failed to make both ends meet. Hence they gladly accepted the offer of an elderly and well-to-do townsman to send the lad to school and keep him with him.
A scapegrace, a ne'er-do-well, an incorrigible, hopeless of himself, despaired of by others, he has "gone wrong and run wild." His heart, still in the right place, has been sealed up.
The big, clumsy ne'er-do-well of a boy, Cradock by name, who was choking with secret laughter as he tilted little Eden's bed leaving a pause of frightful suspense now and then to let him recover breath and realise his situation was as raw and ill-trained a fellow as you like, but he had nothing in him wilfully or diabolically wicked.
Our ne'er-do-well having no more money, his wife left him, and he, not knowing what to do next, took the desperate step of going to Bressa, a town within the Venetian territory, where he sought the governor, telling him his name, the story of his flight, and his repentance, begging the governor to take him under his protection and to obtain his pardon.
She thought of the old life in the pretty cottage at Ashwood, where for so short a time she had been happy with her handsome, ne'er-do-well husband, whom at first she had loved so blindly; she thought of the lovely, golden-haired child which she had loved so wildly, and of the kind, clever doctor, who had been so suddenly called to his account; and then her thoughts wandered to the stranger who had intrusted his child to her care.
His father had no love for him, and called him a ne'er-do-well. His brothers often tormented him by dragging him off the stove, and taking away his food indeed, he would many a time have gone hungry if his mother had not been good to him and fed him on the quiet. She caressed him fondly, for why should he suffer, thought she, if he does happen to have been born a fool?
"Now Lem Parraday's opened that bar of his'n an' he'd oughter be tarred an' feathered for doin' of it I 'spect Hopewell will be hangin' about there most of his time like the rest o' the ne'er-do-well male critters of this town, an' a-lettin' of what little business he's got go to pot." "Oh, Miz Scattergood," said Aunt 'Mira comfortably, "I wouldn't give way ter sech forebodin's.
"You will find out the lie without my telling you," mumbled the witch; "your business is not perhaps such a bad one as it seemed to me at first. Katuti may thank the ne'er-do-well who staked his father's corpse. You don't understand me? Well, if you are really the sharpest of them all over there, what must the others be?"
The sequel was that it served her even a better turn than it had served Adelina Patti. I played and transposed for the piano most of the melodies of Foster as they were published, they being first produced in public by Christy's Minstrels. Stephen Foster was the ne'er-do-well of a good Pennsylvania family. A sister of his had married a brother of James Buchanan.
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