MODERN TROGLODYTES
Not many years ago there was a man who lived by the Devil's Dyke, on the South Downs of Sussex, in a shelter under a hedge, picking up coppers from visitors to the Dyke, dressed like Ally Sloper, but living in a manner more squalid and under a worse shelter than would be endured by most savages in the darkest parts of Africa. What his history was no one knew.
It is now somewhat longer since a medical man, in an excess of impatience against civilisation, constructed for himself a hovel out of hurdles thatched with reeds, in South Devon. He lived in it, solitary, speaking to no one. Occasionally he bought a sheep and killed it, and ate it as the appetite prompted, and before it was done the meat had become putrid. At length the police interfered, the stench became intolerable in the neighbourhood, as the hovel was by the roadside. The doctor was ordered to remove, and he went no one seems to know whither.
In Charles the First's time there were men living in the caves and dens of the ravines about Lydford in South Devon. They had a king over them named Richard Rowle, and they went by the name of the Gubbins. William Browne, a poet of the time, wrote in 1644:—
"The town's enclosed with desert moors.
But where no bear nor lion roars.
And naught can live but hogs;
For all o'erturned by Noah's flood,
Of fourscore miles scarce one foot's good.
And hills are wholly bogs.
And near hereto's the Gubbins' cave;
A people that no knowledge have
Of law, of God, or men;
Whom Cæsar never yet subdued.
Who've lawless liv'd; of manners rude;
All savage in their den.
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