John Leland

     I remembered then that my father had once told of a man who devoted much of his life to wandering about compiling notes for a history of England. He had walked the cart roads and lanes, roamed along the seashore, and explored many ruins left unnoticed before his time. My father had traveled with him a time or two for a few days. His name, I recalled, was John Leland. (from Sackett's Land, by Louis L'Amour)

    Anyone who is at all acquainted with the history of Baptists in America knows the name John Leland, whose influence played a large part in the insertion of the Bill of Rights into our constitution. The John Leland (1503-1552) whom L'Amour mentions in this book was a real person, also. He has been described as "the father of English local history and bibliography." He served as the tutor to the son of the 2nd Duke of Norfolk.

    In 1533, Leland apparently was granted a commission by the King, which authorized him to examine and use the libraries of all religious houses in England. He spent years compiling lists of important volumes and taking measures to encourage their preservation.

Why people stayed home

     Roads were mere cart tracks or trails, wandering by the easiest routes through the forests and across the land. All were infested with thieves and highwaymen.

    These things my father had told me. There were scattered farms, a few great estates. A few old Roman roads were still in use. New roads were often knee-deep in mud.

    Waterways would offer the easiest route across country, but any travel was a hardship. Most who travel understood why the word "travel" had once been "travail."

(from Sackett's Land, by Louis L'Amour)

Nowhere to hide from hate

     "We will lie quiet and fish for a few days," I told Jublain. "Then off for London."

    "London? Are you daft, man? That is where Genester will be, and where he is strongest."

    "It is a vast city," I said complacently. "Folk say more than one hundred thousand people live there. How could I be found among so many?"

    "You are a child," Jublain said angrily. "It is too small a place in which to hide from hate."

(from Sackett's Land, by Louis L'Amour)

The fens

     There was a goodly chance none of those who had witnessed my deed had seen me before, or my village. Yet if such there was, once I reached the fens I was lost to them.

    For the fens were a vast area of low-lying ground, of shallow lakes and winding waterways, impassable swamps with here and there limestone outcroppings that created small islands, often with clumps of birch or ancient oaks.

(from Sackett's Land, by Louis L'Amour)

Stay alert!

     "And Chesney hasn't got here yet? Something must have happened to him."

    Wilbur's surmise was right. Headed in his car for Shropshire and his thousand dollars, Howard Chesney had won through only as far as Worcestershire. He was lying with a broken leg in the cottage hospital of the village of Wibley-in-the-vale in that county, a salutary object lesson to the inhabitants of the hamlet not to go to sleep at the wheel of a car when on the wrong side of the road with a truck laden with mineral water bottles coming the other way.

(from A Pelican At Blandings, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Violent awakening

 Wilbur's room was the one in which, according to legend, an Emsworth of the fifteenth century had dismembered his wife with a battle axe, as husbands in those days were so apt to do when the strain of married life became too much for them. The unfortunate woman must have experienced a good deal of apprehension when she heard him at the door, but not much more than did Wilbur when Vanessa's knock sounded in the silent night. Not even Lord Emsworth at the top of his table-upsetting form could have produced a deeper impression. After lying awake for several hours he had at last fallen into a doze, and the knock had coincided with the point in his nightmare when a bomb had exploded under his feet.

(from A Pelican At Blandings, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Concerning imposters

     "You don't think I'm going to squeal to Connie?"

    "Aren't you?"

    "Of course I'm not."

    "But I'm an imposter."

    "And why shouldn't you be? Practically everyone else who comes here is. Man and boy I have seen more imposters at Blandings Castle than you could shake a stick at in a month of Sundays. It would have surprised me greatly if you hadn't been an imposter. You've gone to endless trouble to get here. Do you think I'm going to dash the cup from your lips? Secrecy and silence, my wench, secrecy and silence."

(from A Pelican At Blandings, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

The prudent course

     "Her ladyship would like a word with you, Mr. Galahad."

    "Then what a pity," said Gally, "that she isn't going to get it."

    "Sir?"

    "You hunted high and low, you turned stones and explored avenues, but you couldn't find me. You think I must have gone to Market Blandings to buy tobacco. That is your story, Beach, and be careful to tell it without any of the hesitations and stammerings which are so apt to arouse suspicion in the auditor. Above all, remember not to stand on one leg. What you will be aiming at in her ladyship is that willing suspension of disbelief dramatic critics are always talking about. Tell your tale so that it can be swallowed. In this way much unpleasantness will be avoided," said Gally.

    He was an intrepid man and was not afraid of his sister Constance. He merely thought it wise not to confer with her until the hot blood had had time to cool. He had pursued the same policy in the past with Honest Jerry Judson and Tim Simms the Safe Man.

(from A Pelican At Blandings, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Adds new meaning to the term "cold turkey"

 The supper had been a festive one, to celebrate the victory of a horse on whom as the result of a tip from the stable we had all had our bit, and I suppose they were both somewhat flushed with wine, for this argument started. Dunstable maintained that those claims were perfectly justified, and your father said the church of Abyssinia was talking through its hat, and things got more and more heated, and finally Dunstable took up a bowl of fruit salad and was about to strike your father with it, when your father grabbed this turkey, which was on a side table with the other cold viands, and with one blow laid him out as flat as a crepe suzette.

(from A Pelican At Blandings, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Just leave it alone!

     Lady Constance looked like a dying duck because a sudden bright light had flashed upon her. The mists had cleared, and she saw what is generally described as all. She was in possession of the facts, and they could have only one interpretation. Like a serpent, although perhaps not altogether like a serpent, for serpents do draw the line somewhere, her brother Galahad had introduced another imposter into the castle.

    Blandings Castle in recent years had been particularly rich in impostors. One or two of them had had other sponsors, but as a rule it was Gally who sneaked them in, and the realization that he had done it again filled her, as she had so often been filled before, with a passionate desire to skin him with a blunt knife.

    Once, when they were children, Galahed had fallen into the deep pond in the kitchen garden, and just as he was about to sink for the third time one of the gardeners had come along and pulled him out. She was brooding now on the thoughtless folly of that misguided gardener. Half the trouble in the world, she was thinking, was caused by people not letting well alone.

(from A Pelican At Blandings, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

The formal designation

     "He ought to be certified."

    Gally stroked his chin thoughtfully. He removed his eyeglass, and gave it a polish.

    "I don't think I can go as far as that," he said, "but he certainly ought to see a psychiatrist."

    "A what?"

    "One of those fellows who ask you questions about your childhood and gradually dig up the reason why you go about shouting 'Fire' in crowded theatres. They find it's because somebody took away your allday sucker when you were six."

    "I know the chaps you mean. They dump you on a couch and charge you some unholy fee per half hour. Only I thought they were called head-shrinkers."

    "That, I believe, is the medical term."

(from A Pelican At Blandings, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

The look of the hunted

 What with the excellence of its beer and the charm of the shady garden running down to the river in which its patrons drink it, haggard faces are rarely seen at the Emsworth Arms, and the haggardness of John's was all the more noticeable. In these idyllic surroundings it could not but attract attention, and Gally was reminded of his old friend Fruity Biffen on the occasion when he had gone into the ring at Hurst Park wearing a long Assyrian beard in order to avoid recognition by the half dozen bookmakers there to whom he owed money, and the beard, insufficiently smeared with fish glue, had come off. The same wan, drawn look.

(from A Pelican At Blandings, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

She resembles a pig

     "Does she remind you of anyone?" the Duke proceeded. It was only inadvertently that he ever allowed anyone to finish a sentence. "I ask because a fellow I know, an American fellow called Trout, says she's the image of his third wife, while Emsworth insists that she has a distinct look of that pig of his."

    "I was thinking -"

    "Something about the expression in her eyes, he said, and the way she's lying. He said he had seen his pig lying like that a hundred times. It does it after a heavy meal."

    "What I was going to say - "

    "And oddly enough I notice quite a resemblance to our vicar's wife down in Wiltshire. Only the face, of course, for I never saw her lying in the nude on a mossy bank. I doubt if the vicar would let her."

(from A Pelican At Blandings, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Concerning ugly ancestors

 The Duke and Lady Constance were up in the portrait gallery. On the previous day the former's reclining nude had been hung there, and Lady Constance was scrutinizing it without pleasure. She was a woman who, while not knowing much about Art, knew what she liked, and the kind of paintings she liked were those whose subjects were more liberally draped. A girl with nothing on except a quite inadequate wisp of some filmy material, she told the Duke, was out of place in the company of her ancestors, and the Duke in rebuttal replied that her ancestors were such a collection of ugly thugs that it was a charity to give the viewer something to divert his attention from them.

(from A Pelican At Blandings, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Nervous bridegrooms

     "Bridegrooms are seldom in a frame of mind to take a calm look at their surroundings as the situation starts to develop. How well I remember your father when the parson was putting him through it. White as a sheet and quivering in every limb. I was his best man, and I'm convinced that if I hadn't kept near enough to him to grab him by the coat tails, he'd have run like a rabbit."

    "I shan't do that. I shall quiver all right, but I'll stay put."

    "I hope so, for nothing so surely introduces a sour note into the wedding ceremony as the abrupt disappearance of the groom in a cloud of dust."

(from A Pelican At Blandings, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

The key to good health

     Thirty years ago it would have been most unusual for Galahad Threepwood to return home at so early an hour as this, for in his bohemian youth it had been his almost nightly custom to attend gatherings at the Pelican Club which seldom broke up till the milkman had begun his rounds - a practice to which he always maintained that he owed the superb health he enjoyed in middle age.

    "It really is an extraordinary thing," a niece of his had once said, discussing him with a friend, "that anyone who has had as good a time as Gally has had can be so frightfully fit. Everywhere you look you see men who have led model lives pegging out in their thousands, while good old Gally, who was the mainstay of Haig and Haig for centuries and as far as I can make out never went to bed till he was fifty, is still breezing along as rosy and full of beans as ever.

(from A Pelican At Blandings, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

[Haig and Haig is a blended Scotch whisky packaged in a unique three-sided bottle.]

Alaric, the Duke

 Many people are fond of Dukes and place no obstacle in the way if the latter wish to fraternize with them, but few of those acquainted with Alaric, Duke of Dunstable, sought his society, Lord Emsworth least of all. He was an opinionated, arbitrary, autocratic man with an unpleasantly loud voice, bulging eyes and a walrus moustache which he was always blowing at and causing to leap like a rocketting pheasant, and he had never failed to affect Lord Emsworth unfavourably. Galahad, with his gift for the telling phrase, generally referred to the Duke as "that stinker," and there was no question in Lord Emsworth's mind that he had hit on the right label. 

(from A Pelican At Blandings, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Those good and simple days

     "That stuff smells good, Beach. What is it?"

    "Leg of lamb, m'lord, with boiled potatoes."

    Lord Emsworth received the information with a gratified nod. Good plain English fare. How different, he was thinking, from the bad old era when his sister Constance had been the Fuhrer of Blandings Castle. Under her regime dinner would have meant dressing and sitting down, probably with a lot of frightful guests, to a series of ghastly dishes with French names, and fuss beyond belief if one happened to swallow one's front shirt stud and substituted for it a brass paper-fastener.

(from A Pelican At Blandings, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Her forty winks

The summer day was drawing to a close and dusk had fallen on Blandings Castle, shrouding from view the ancient battlements, dulling the silver surface of the lake and causing Lord Emsworth's supreme Berkshire sow Empress of Blandings to leave the open air portion of her sty and withdraw into the covered shed where she did her sleeping. A dedicated believer in the maxim of early to bed and early to rise, she always turned in at about this time. Only by getting its regular eight hours can a pig keep up to the mark and preserve that schoolgirl complexion.

(from A Pelican at Blandings, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

One way to make a cast

 Lin had a broken leg. He was skinned up and bruised not unlike what happened to me, but he had the busted leg to boot. They'd set the bone, put splints on the leg, and bound it up with wet rawhide, which had dried and shrunk tight around the leg.

(from Lonely On the Mountain, by Louis L'Amour)

A salty character

     Orrin turned to the door, and his hand was on the latch when Riel spoke again. "Wait! There is a man, an American like yourself. He is in jail here. I think he is a good man."

    "In jail for what?"

    "Fighting."

    Orrin smiled. "All right. I will talk to him."

    "If you hire him, the case will be dismissed." Riel smiled slyly, his eyes twinkling. "Just take him away from here. It needed four of my men to get him locked up."

(from Lonely On the Mountain, by Louis L'Amour)

Canadian history

    "This Riel," the latter said distastefully, "who does he think he is? How dare he? He's nothing but a bloody savage!"

    "I understood he'd studied for the priesthood," the young man protested, "and worked for some paper in Montreal or somewhere."

    "Balderdash! The man's an aborigine! Why, he's part Indian! Everybody knows that!" 

    "One-eighth," the young man said.

    "No matter. Who does he think he is?"

    "From what I hear," Orrin suggested mildly, "he simply stepped in to provide a government where there was none."

    "Balderdash! The man's an egotistical fool! Well," he said finally, "no need to bother about him. The army will be here soon, and they'll hang him. Hang him, I say!"

    The young man looked over at Orrin and shrugged. After a bit, he walked forward with him. "A man of definite opinions," Orrin said mildly.

(from Lonely On the Mountain, by Louis L'Amour)

Riel and the Metis are not fictional, but he was and they are a very important part of Canadian history. He was one of the founders of the province of Manitoba.

Bullets by the pound

     He saddled swiftly and from long habit drew his rifle from the scabbard. He started to return it, to settle it more securely in place, but something held his hand. What was wrong? He glanced quickly around, but nobody seemed to be watching.

    Then he knew. It was his rifle. The weight was wrong.

    When a man has lived with guns all his life and with one rifle for a good part of it, he knows the weight and feel of it. Quickly, his horse concealing him from the others, he checked the magazine. It was empty. He worked the lever on his rifle. The barrel was empty, too.

    Somebody had deliberately emptied his rifle while he slept!

(from Lonely On the Mountain, by Louis L'Amour)

High opinion of himself

     Gilcrist and the Ox were worrisome men. Tyrel was right when he said Gilcrist fancied himself with a gun, and while I'd never wanted the reputation of gunfighter, a reputation both Tyrel and me had, I kind of wished now Gilcrist knew something about us. Might save trouble.

    Many a man thinks large of himself because he doesn't know the company he's in. No matter how good a man can get at anything, there's always a time when somebody comes along who's better.

(from Lonely On the Mountain, by Louis L'Amour)

Measuring distance in the old west

 "The following day, we put sixteen miles behind us." This excerpt is taken from Lonely On the Mountain, by Louis L'Amour.

    I do not particularly doubt the estimates of mileage that you find in L'Amour's writings, and others. What I am curious about (genuinely) is how they were able to make estimates of the distance with any degree of accuracy.

By the gallon

     Logan and his twin brother Nolan were Clinch Mountain Sacketts, almost a different breed than us. They were rough boys, those Clinch Mountain Sacketts, right down from ol' Yance, who founded the line way back in the 1600s. He settled so far back in the mountains that the country was getting settled up before they even knew he was there.

    Some of those Clinch Mountain Sacketts were Blockaders; least that's what they were called. They raised a lot of corn up in the mountains, and the best way they could get it to market was in liquid form. They began selling by the gallon rather than the bushel.

(from Lonely On the Mountain, yb Louis L'Amour)

It is interesting that in his definitive work about the hillbilly culture, Horace Kephart also listed the factor of ease of transportation as one of the main reasons that moonshiners stuck to their whisky trade. It could be that L'Amour got his information from reading after Kephart.