Daily globe. [volume] (St. Paul, Minn.) 1878-1884, 1883-01-30


matter of serious study to know what to
read. With acres of printed matter COM
ing weekly from the never-wearied presses
and with publishers daily Offering new
food of varied attractiveness, more or less
spiced or not spiced at all, the average
consumer NAV sigh for desolate island,
and the limited library of Robinson Cru
soc. A somewhat remarkable book has
lately come out from London, a book that
one at first hardly knows whether to class
as romance or the autobiography which
1t purports to be. AT last
we are forced to believe that it is the
true story of the authors life.
Then comes a feeling of wonder at the
memory of q man of over eighty years,
that could supply such a world of little
details, and next query how much far
ther the author could have gone had he felt
inclined. The $50 closely printed pages,
which include a series of historical and
moral reflections supplementary to the
actual autobiography, might almost have
been bound up as an encyclopaedia, SO
wide is the range that flames Burn, the
Beggar Boy" sought to compass. A glance
at the index alone "a matter OF nearly
twenty pages) shows that nearly all the
matters affecting social and political
life during the present century IN
England, and, to some extent IN
America, have been touched upon, and, as
the title page reveals, here are glimpses of
English social, commercial and political
history during eighty years, l8o2-1882
Having been ''born in the cold shade OF
poverty. nursed in sorrow, and reared amid
difficulties, hardships and privations," the
author offers the story of his life as
Service in guiding the steps of youth in
the path of duty"
BORN A BEGGAR,
and remaining little more than beggar
up to his early manhood, he fails to tell
how he gained even an elementary educa-
ton, still less knowledge of language and
letters that are required to produce SO we'll
written a book. He appears to have had
actually no school instruction, land through
out his volume. excessively full
In its details of his daily and
almost hourly life, there appears little ref
erence to books, though it is evident he
must have read many. He shows that he
had a taste for reading, but was very near
manhood before he was able to write his
own name. The first book he ever possessed
was copy of "Ramsay's Life of Cyrus, p
given him by friend when he was about
twenty-sixyears of age, and this
gave him craving to pry
into the mysteries of literature.
His mind had decided intellectual bias;
but, unfortunately, it was firmly chained
down in the dungeon of ignorance" and
he ''had none to assist me in breaking the
fetters." The author believes ''there have
been many men who have become orna-
ments to society and benefactors of their
kind whose difficulties were greater" than
his; but, if he lever possessed the capaci-
ty, it was never properly directed and, on
the whole, he thinks he chad more taste
than TALENT
The first recollections of James Burn,
in this very voluminous record of his,
were of being in a large rat-infested garnet
in Dumfries, where his mother, having
been deceived and deserted by his father,
was struggling to keep herself and her boy
from starvation and from being devoured
by the vermin According to his descrip-
ton, more abject poverty cannot be i'm
agined, though the misery of it was in
creased shortly afterward by his mothers
marriage with broken-down and dis
charged veteran of the Peninsula war, I'M
der whose cruelty the boy found his
wretched world scene of hardships for
many years. Together the man and boy
tramped up and down the country, alter
nately begging and peddling small ar
ticles, never knowing where their next
crust of bread was to come from, or what
miserable hovel would shelter them at
night. The step-father was
AN INvETERATE soT,
and the travels were often beguiled with
his attacks of delirium tremens, the hor-
rors of which nearly frightened the little
wretch out of his life. They we're decided
Iy on the lowest plain in the world of beg
gary. and were looked down upon by the
aristocracy of the profession" whose tai
.ents gave them a course of comparative
ease. Of his condition at that time the
writer says: Il was a thing without a
mind, and might be said to have had mel
Their body nor soul of my own; that plastic
part OF my nature which was shortly to be-
come my only patrimony was moulded IN
der influences too frequently of degrading
character and subject to examples
anything but fit to be followed" A
strange and humorous popularity of
McNamee's (the step-father's) char
zacter was his extremely pious
devotion. He never forgot to pray morn
ing or evening; and he never ceased to i'm
press upon his family the necessity of
their leading virtuous lives. This consid-
Grafton leads the author to moralize that
''the difference in physical organization
between philosopher and a fool is often
very small; if my step-father's bumps OF
caution had been little more developed.
he certainly would have been very excel
lent character" The wanderings of the
two Migrants led them to busy London
where the mother and the other children
Joined them, but where no stop was made.
The miserable flock kept on the wing,
gathering up rags, horse hair and other
refuse materials in exchange for the arti-
cles they bantered, the boy
carrying the heavy bags on his back and
bearing the heavy kicks that were
freely showered on him. They travelled
over nearly the whole of England, Wales
and Scotland, sometimes as beggars, then
as peddlers, and always as miserable raga-
mullins, who often saw the interiors of iails
in consequence of the step-father's pro-
pensity for petty thieving when in drink
When about fifteen years of age James
R,,ry, baooroa aUare that he had father