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 handsome as blazes, and well-informed up to a point that he read Shakespeare for the mere pleasure o't.

"Well, she sold up the stock-in-trade an' hired a couple o' rooms--the self-same rooms you see: and then she ate less 'n a mouse an' took in needle-work, plain an' fancy: for a lot o' the gentry's wives round the neighbourhood befriended her--though they had to be sly an' hide that they meant it for a favour, or she'd ha' snapped their heads off. An' all the while, she was teachin' her boy and tellin' 'en, whatever happened, to remember he was a gentleman, an' lovin' 'en with all the strength of a desolate woman.

"This Willie Pinsent was a comely boy, too: handsome as old Key, an' quick at his books. He'd a bold masterful way, bein' proud as ever his mother was, an' well knowin' there wasn' his match in Tregarrick for head-work. Such a beautiful hand he wrote! When he was barely turned sixteen they gave 'en a place in Gregory's Bank--Wilkins an' Gregory it was in those aged times. He still lived home wi' his mother, rentin' a room extra out of his earnin's, and turnin' one of the bedrooms into