A WEAVER'S SON.

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own looms. He had fourteen children, whose education had to be neglected. It was not, however, forgotten. 'If you want education you must get it yourselves,' was the stern decree. My great-grandfather Henry saw only one escape from the misery and ignorance about him.

He had already been taking lessons in the school of nature, seeing what animals did at the last pinch, and learning a little of their craft. Playing one day on the mound of the famous 'Keep,' he saw a tired fox creep up and disappear in a hole in a wall. The huntsmen soon came. 'Have you seen the fox?' one of them asked sharply. 'I don't know where he is,' was the evasive reply, which time did not allow them to question.

My ancestor accordingly, at a very early age, hired himself to a farmer to follow the plough one day and go to school the other. He had to keep himself, and he lived on oatcake and oatmeal porridge. He must have made great progress, for at a very early age he went to an attorney's office at Doncaster in some humble capacity, and no doubt did much engrossing, for he became an exquisite penman. He was also a good accountant, and he must have been a great reader.

My own handwriting--not that which now meets the compositor's eye, but such as it was in its golden age, and before I wasted the precious patrimony in scribbling is no doubt direct, through three descents, from the weaver's son and from Conisborough school. My father's hand was always as good as copperplate. Every line of it might have been engraved as a copy

at the head of a page in an exercise-book. I may say that my father never wrote a single letter of our rather slippery alphabet out of shape. But it was the hand of a schoolmaster, or of a banker's clerk, whereas the weaver's son wrote the hand of a scholar of the good old school. My father was his grandfather's pet and favourite, as I became his; and was most like his grandfather as I was most like him.

Adoption, in the old Roman sense, has very little place in English law or usage. Families are generally large enough to dispense with the necessity, while bachelors are generally too independent to fetter themselves with quasi-parental obligations. But adoption within the family- that is, the acceptance of a child as inheriting the largest share of the parent's natureis common enough, and frequently inevitable.

Notwithstanding the chance of encountering undesirable relatives, my father always hailed back to Conisborough, as the nest of the family.

In 1842, three years before his death, he took me to Gainsborough, spending a night at Conisborough on the way. I afterwards found that my mother had wished to accompany him, but he preferred me. This was to be a pilgrimage, not a progress. After examining the Castle, we walked into the village. Immediately upon our entering it, a pretty girl of thirteen or so left a group in advance of us, walked up to my father, and, with a slight curtesy, presented him with a bouquet. Without waiting for any kind of reply, she turned on her heels and rejoined her companions. I was sentimental or superstitious enough to feel it must signify something that I did not know of.

LIVE AND LEARN.

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Our quarters at the village inn were straitened, and we occupied the same bedroom. In the morning I put on my coat and waistcoat together, as I always did. My father was astonished. He had never seen it done before, and it did not seem to have occurred to him that it was possible.

Yet my father was a very ingenious man. I remember him frequently throwing a lighted paper into his boots before drawing them on, in the belief that a certain amount of suction would follow the cooling of the heated air. The belief itself would be a substantial element in the process. My father wore spectacles from the age of fifteen. Going out birds'nesting with his schoolfellows, he found that any of them would see a nest before he did. This led to the discovery that his eyesight was at fault, and that both for near and for distant objects. For nearly as long as I can remember he wore spectacles of four different foci. The two eyes required different foci, and each glass was subdivided into an upper focus for walking, and a lower focus for reading. He had often to explain this, for to the uninitiated it looked as if the glasses were broken.

CHAPTER XII.

FROM DONCASTER TO GAINSBOROUGH.

FROM Doncaster, the weaver's son went to Gainsborough. To modern ideas, at least to such as prevail in the south of England, this must seem a downward

step, but I am not quite sure that even in these days any one in that region, having to make his way in the world, would so regard it. Gainsborough was then rapidly rising as an inland port for London and Baltic shipping on the one hand, and for canals, or 'navigations' as they were called, on the other.

Lincoln was no longer a port. This may seem very superfluous information to some of my readers, so I must explain. The Romans, though able now and then to make a great effort and scour the seas, generally relied on their military system, their hold of the strong points, their frontier fortifications and garrisons, and their lines of communication. They preferred to be at a little distance from the open sea. They made, or possibly only improved, a canal from Lincoln to Torksey, eight miles off, on the Trent, protecting the junction with a strong castle.

When the Danes came on the scene, they were menacing, invading, and for long periods occupying the land from the sea, of which they had command; and for this purpose they preferred Gainsborough to Lincoln. From Gainsborough they commanded all Lindsey- that is, the northern half of Lincolnshireand could provision their fleets and sally forth to land, in a few days, on any part of the eastern or south-eastern coast.

As soon as the Normans had established their supremacy over both Saxon and Dane, they seem to have reverted to the Roman plan of occupation. In 1121, Henry I. cleared out the canal from Lincoln to Torksey, and rebuilt the castle at the junction. The result was that eighty years after, in the reign of

THE ROMAN, AND THE DANISH PORT. 61

John, Lincoln was the fourth port in the kingdom, its trade being only exceeded, and that not considerably, by London, Boston, and Southampton. The canal, however, required continual scouring, and must have fallen into bad condition in the Wars of the Roses. A Bishop of Lincoln then cleared and deepened the channel half the way from the Trent to Lincoln, when the work was stopped by his death, and by the Reformation, which disabled bishops from attempting great works, and set nobody in their place to do them.

Taylor, the Water Poet, has left us a humorous account of a voyage made in the Forcedike Flood, as it was inappropriately called, in the reign of Charles I. It took him nine hours to do the eight miles, so much was the passage obstructed by shallows, mud, and weeds, and it was often as much as his nine men could do to draw the boat like so many horses.

My great-grandfather seems to have had a good many irons in the fire, trying first one employment, then another, all apparently with success. He kept a school long enough to have scholars that did him credit and were grateful. He was an accountant and as such was frequently consulted by tradesmen in difficulties, and invited to arbitrate in disputes. He made many wills dealing with considerable properties. The duplicate of the will he made for his own father is a model of penmanship and of just expression. For some time he was a grocer.

For a longer time he had a windmill for the crushing of linseed. The mill I remember, but the sails had now given place to steam. The particular