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 N a pleasant village, about 100 miles from London, situated on the banks of a small river, and at the bottom of a high hill, dwelt an honest hard-working old couple, named Timothy and Deborah Clay. Timothy was a ploughman, and worked for farmer Hay field; and Deborah used to weed in the fields, and do other jobs, but was now past hard labour, and employed herself in spinning worsted, and. knitting stockings for her husband and grandson. They had only one daughter, who died when Benjamin, her child, was an infant, as did her husband soon afterwards of a violent fever; upon which the old couple took the little orphan, and brought him up with the greatest care and tenderness they were capable of.

As they had some difficulty to make both ends meet, they could not afford to send him to school, but put him to work as soon as he was able to do any thing, so that when he was nine years old, he did not know a letter of the alphabet, and as there was no church in the village, he knew nothing about God and his Son Jesus Christ, but was as ignorant of his Bible, as a heathen or a hottentor.

About this time some good people hired a room at old Dame Motherley’s, and opened