Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/97

71 THE BOOKSELLERS OF OLDEN TIMES. 71 amusing and instructive biography. He was born at Wellington in 1746, and his father, a drunken cobbler, would not even pay the requisite twopence a week for his son's education. Loafing about the streets all day as a. child, he thought he might turn his wanderings to account by crying pies, and as a pie- boy he acquired such a pre-eminence that he was soon engaged to vend almanacs. At fourteen he left this vagrant life to be apprenticed to a shoe-maker, and his master's family becoming strong adherents to the new sect of Methodists, he too was converted, and would trudge, he says, through frost and snow at midnight to hear " an inspired husbandman, shoe- maker, blacksmith, or a woolcomber" preach to ten or a dozen people, when he might have quietly stopped at home to listen to " the sensible and learned ministers at Taunton." However, what he heard " made me think they knew many matters of which I was totally ignorant," and he set to work arduously at night to learn his letters, and when he was able to read, he bought Hobbe's Homer at a bookstall, and found that his let- ters did but little in assisting his comprehension ; however, in his zeal for knowledge he allowed himself " but three hours' sleep in the twenty-four." The art of writing was acquired in a similar manner, and then he started on a working tour, making shoes on the road for sustenance, -but suffering many hardships and miseries. To make matters worse, at Bristol he married a young girl of his own class, whose ill- health, though he was passionately fond of her, added no little to his troubles. Accordingly he went to London, that for her sake he might earn higher wages, and not altogether unhopeful of the fortunes he