At Charnwood, then, we behold him thoughtful, grave, ascetic. From his cradle averse to flesh-meats and strong drink; abstemious even beyond the genius of the place; and almost in spite of the remonstrances of his great-aunt, who, though strict, was not rigid, water was his habitual drink, and his food little beyond the mast and beech-nuts of his favourite groves. It is a medical fact, that this kind of diet, however favourable to the contemplative powers of the primitive hermits, &c., is but ill adapted to the less robust minds and bodies of a later generation. Hypochondria almost constantly ensues, and young Liston was subject to sights and had visions. Those arid beech-nuts, distilled by a complexion naturally adust, mounted into a brain, already prepared to kindle by long seclusion and the fervour of strict Calvinistic notions. In the glooms of Charnwood he was assailed by illusions, similar in kind to those which are related of the famous Anthony of Padua. Wild antic faces would ever and anon protrude themselves upon his _sensorium_. Whether he shut his eyes or kept them open, the same illusion operated. The darker and more profound were his cogitations, the droller and more whimsical became the apparitions. They buzzed about him, thick as flies, flapping at him, floating at him, hooting in his ear; yet with such comic appendages, that what at first was his bane, became at length his solace; and he desired no better society than that of his merry phantasmata. We shall presently find in what way this remarkable phenomenon influenced his future destiny. On the death of Mrs. Sittingbourn, Liston was received into the family of Mr. Willoughby, an eminent Turkey merchant, in Birchin Lane. He was treated more like a son than a clerk, though he was nominally but the latter. Different avocations, change of scene, with alternation of business and recreation, appear to have weaned him in a short time from the hypochondriacal affections which had beset him at Charnwood. Within the next three years we find him making more than one voyage to the Levant, as chief factor for Mr. Willoughby at the Porte: he used to relate pleasant passages of his having been taken up on a suspicion of a design of penetrating the seraglio, &c.; but some of these are whimsical, and others of a romantic nature.