Page:The Life and Struggles of William Lovett.djvu/26

6 my conduct, I will relate the following: "Having returned from school one winter evening, and finding my mother not returned from market, I went to meet her. On crossing a beach leading to the next village, I saw two persons at a little distance from me seeking for something with a lantern. Before I came to them, seeing something shining upon the beach, I stooped down and found it to be a shilling. I accordingly made my way towards the parties, believing them to be seeking for it. But on enquiring what they had lost, I was replied to with a buffet on the head, and bidden to go my way. Taking this in dudgeon, I went on and took the shilling with me. Not meeting with my mother on the road I turned back, and found that she had got home before me. To her I told my story about the shilling, half believing that I had acted rightly, after the treatment I had received, until I saw the frown gathering on my mother's countenance, and the rod being sought for, by a few strokes of which I soon became enlightened to the contrary. She then took me back to the owner of the shilling, to apologize to him for not having given it to him as soon as I found it; and on my way back I received from her a lecture on honesty, which I never afterwards forgot. This old gentleman, to whom I took back the shilling, was a man of some little property in our town, and had, I believe, a large spice of humour in his composition as the following anecdote shows:—He having an orchard at the upper end of the street he lived in, from which he found it difficult to gather much of its fruit, by reason of repeated thefts, got an old man, who lived in a cottage at the bottom of it, to rent it from him. This old man was a journeyman miller, and made a great profession of religion; but was withal a very curious specimen of a religious man, as he could never be induced to say grace over fish and potatoes, a very common dinner in a fishing town. The first question when he came home at noon, was to ask his mistress what she had got for dinner. If it happened to be baked potatoes, pork, and pie-crust—a favourite dinner with him—Uncle Jemmy would kneel down and make a long grace over it; but if it was a dinner of fish and