Page:The English Peasant.djvu/262

 day (it was in June) brought me to Richmond in the afternoon. Two pennyworth of bread and cheese and a pennyworth of small beer, which I had on the road, and one halfpenny that I had lost somehow or other, left threepence in my pocket; with this for my whole fortune I was trudging through Richmond in my blue smock frock, and my red gaiters tied under my knees, when, staring about me, my eyes fell on a little book in a bookseller's window, on the outside of which was written, 'Tale of a Tub,' price threepence. The title was so odd that my curiosity was excited. I had the threepence, but then I could have no supper. In I went and got the little book, which I was so impatient to read that I got over into a field at the upper corner of Kew Gardens, where there stood a haystack. On the shady side of this I sat down to read. The book was so different from anything that I had ever read before, it was something so new to my mind, that though I could not at all understand some of it, it delighted me beyond description; and it produced what I have always considered a sort of birth of intellect. I read on till it was dark without any thought about supper or bed. When I could see no longer I put my little book in my pocket and tumbled down by the side of the stack, where I slept till the birds in Kew Gardens awaked me in the morning; when off I started to Kew reading my little book."

Cobbett was a writer who always tried to express in words the exact meaning of his thoughts. This statement of his, therefore, that reading "The Tale of a Tub" produced in him a birth of intellect is not to be dismissed as a mere so-to-speak. lie here claims the author of " The Tale of a Tub" as his literary parent; and it is a singular fact that in the development of his intellectual powers Cobbett manifested a likeness to Swift so marked, that we are forced to say, as we should do in an analogous case of a physical resemblance, "Why, he is the very image of his father."

At the end of the vale of which we have spoken as opening up just in front of Grandmother Cobbett's cottage, is a substantial red-bricked house, with gable roof and three dormer windows. The walls are covered with ivy, and festooned with American creepers. All around are woods rising high above the house. In