of the heart, borders on the intolerable. There was at this

same Kimmersden school (even in village schools variety of character will come out) a boy who seemed to be somewhat of this sort. When a little money came into his possession, he bought Wesley's Hymns, and of a summer evening you might have seen him walking in the fields, reciting his favorite pieces with intense enjoyment. His mother was once dangerously ill, and his father sent him on horseback, in the night, for medical assistance; as he rode back, in the breaking morning, he heard a bird sing in the park by the wayside; he listened in strange delight, and seemed to receive some tidings from the carol. On reaching home, he went to his sister, and gravely informed her that he knew their mother would recover, that God had answered his prayers on her account, and that this had become known to him as he heard a little bird sing in Mells Park that morning. Not one boy in a thousand-we speak with deliberation—would have marked that bird's song. On another day, you might have observed him coming along a lane on horseback; as you looked, you saw that he was not thinking of his horse ΟΙ his way; his eyes had an abstracted look, though animated and filled with tears; the bridle had fallen from his hand, and his horse was quietly eating grass. He was at the moment in reverie; he was dreaming himself a missionary in far lands; and the tears streamed down his cheeks as he knelt among tropical bushes, under a southern sun, to implore blessing on the household he had left at home. Such was the sentimental scholar of Kimmersden. And what was his name! Samuel Budgett!

Nature had framed no contradiction. The boy's heart was tenderly affectionate, his nature keenly sensitive, his sympathies rich, kindly, poetic: but his young eyes had seen nothing but struggling and penury in his father's house; he had learned,

by natural shrewdness and happy occasion, the lesson of thrift: he had a brain as clear and inventive as his heart was warm; by accident or otherwise, the pleasurable exercise of his faculties in that juvenile trading commenced, and with the relish of a born merchant he followed out the game. The money itself was little more to him than the men are to a born chess-player; its accumulation merely testified that all worked well. The coalescence and relative position of the two sets of qualities were sometimes finely shown; he wasted no money, yet he lost no time in buying Wesley's Hymns; he amassed thirty pounds in a few years of boyish trading, but when the sum was complete he gave it all to his parents.

Having come finally to the decision to be a merchant, and adopting it as his ambition to raise his family to tolerably affluent circumstances, he was apprenticed at the age of fifteen to an elder brother, by a former marriage, who had a shop in Kingswood, a village four miles from Bristol. His education, now formally completed, had, in all relating to books, been meager enough. He had learned to read, write, and to some extent count; no more. In other respects, it had been more thorough. He had already, in his boyish mercantile operations, served an apprenticeship to clearness of head, promptitude and firmness in action; his father's house had been a school of rare excellence; so rare, that, on the whole, flinging in Pocklington Academy, and St. John's College Oxford, and the Gallery of the House of Commons, into the opposite scale, we do not hesitate a moment in pronouncing his education superior to that of Wilberforce. In that house he saw honesty, industry, determination, and godliness; he saw how severe the struggle for existence really is; he saw how faculties must be worked in order to their effective exercise. Of special importance was that portion of his education which consisted in the influence of

his mother's godliness. He was still a child of nine, when he happened one day to saunter past her room; the door was shut, and he heard her voice. She was engaged in prayer, and the subject of her petitions was her family. He heard his own name. His heart was at once touched, and from that moment it turned toward heaven. We deem it a very beautiful family incident. The heart of that mother was probably heavy at the moment, her eyes perhaps filled with tears; yet God heard her, and on herself was bestowed the angelic office of answering her own prayer. Samuel Budgett went to apprenticeship from his father's house, a steady, kindly, radically able, and religious youth.

His apprenticeship was not such as to permit his habits of perseverant industry to be broken or to relax. He was at the counter by six in the morning," and nine, ten, or eleven at night," were the ordinary hours of closing. The toil he underwent was such, that he used to speak of it till the close of his life. He was of small strength, and little for his years; the exertion of the grocer's business was doubtless too much for him. He soon became a favorite with customers, his manner was so unaffectedly kind, his attention so close and uniform. It is interesting also to observe the keen thirst for knowledge which he displayed during those years. If he heard a sermon,

he treasured it up like a string of pearls, and adjourned at its close to some sequestered place, to con it over, and lay it up in his inmost heart. What books came in his way he eagerly devoured; for poetry he showed a keen relish, and committed large portions to memory. He exclaims, almost in anguish, "O wisdom! O knowledge!-the very expressions convey ideas so delightful to the mind, that I am ready to leap out and. fly; for why should my ideas always be confined within the narrow compass of our shop walls?" A shop-boy with so

genuine and fixed an aspiration after knowledge will scarce fail to find education. The power to act nobly and effectively may exist with little book-knowledge: to know living men, to have sat long under the stern but thorough teaching of experience, to have a sympathy open to the unnumbered influences of exhaustless and ever-healthful nature, may set a man above those who have studied all things at second-hand, as seen through other eyes, and represented by feeble human speech. Budgett had the faculty to work well; he was acquiring a thorough knowledge of men and a power to measure them at a glance; he loved the open fields and sky, the summer woods and the river bank, and every smile and frown of the ever-changing but ever-expressive face of what the ancients well called our Mother Earth. About the time when his apprenticeship closed, in August, 1816, we find him writing thus to a friend :— "As it respects my coming to Frome, I thank you for your kind invitation. I have intended going; but I assure you, when it comes to the point, I have no inclination to go any where; for, if I can not find happiness at home, it is in vain to seek it any where else. I think if I were to come with the determination to enjoy the company of my friends, by going to any places of recreation or amusement, though I am very fond of such kind of engagements, particularly where religion and real happiness is the subject of conversation, yet it may tend rather to divert my mind from God as the source of my happiness, than unite it to him. But for one thing I have long felt an earnest though secret desire; which is, to spend a little time with you and Mr. T alone, where no object but God could attract our attention; that we may, by devout conversation, by humble, fervent, faithful prayer, get our souls united to each other, and to God our living Head, by the strongest ties of love and affection." The young man who writes

thus from behind a grocer's counter, has pretty well supplied the defects of his education; in important respects he is educated. The idea of the last sentence is that of the noblest possible friendship; we can look for no fairer spectacle than that of those three friends kneeling before God, that the celestial bond of a common love for Him may knit their hearts. And it is worthy of remark, that the style of our extract is unquestionably good; clear, nervous, direct, and free from any trace of juvenile bravura.

The reader will begin to see that our opinion of Samuel Budgett is somewhat high. It is so. We consider him far the ablest man of whom we have yet treated; a character of uncommon breadth and completeness; an embodiment of English sagacity, intelligence, energy, and piety, as healthful and respectable as any time could show; and conveying, in his lifesermon, many and most important lessons, as the Christian merchant and freeman of the nineteenth century.

After serving for three years with a salary, on the expiration of his seven years' apprenticeship, Samuel was taken into partnership by his brother.

We

He feels now that he has got a firm footing, that a spot had been found in the world on which he may live and work. He prepares himself for the future accordingly. A pleasant little background of romance suddenly beams out upon us. find that long ago—"very early"—he had fallen in love with a certain Miss Smith, of Midsomer Norton. His little touch of originality had been manifested here too; he ventured to admit hope into his heart to this serious extent; he had dared to permit imagination to paint, in clear hues and with a flush of nlight over its front, a snug pretty little cottage on his horizon, with one waiting at its threshold who to him seemed heavenly fair; and so, during all his toil in that dismal prosaic