the simplicity of my manner, my confident and lively air, and, doubtless his own compassion besides, induced the gardener, who was a Scotsman, I remember, to give me victuals, find me lodging, and set me to work. In his fragmentary reminiscence of that experience, Cobbett does not say how long he stayed at Kew; but we presently find him at home again, soon to set out on further escapades. He tells us how the boy princes, attracted by the oddity of his dress, stopped to laugh at him as he was sweeping the grass round the Pagoda. I have somewhere read a story that King George himself took notice of the young rustic as carrying a book with him to work, and was so pleased by his talk as to desire that he should be kept on; but I do not remember any statement to this effect in Cobbett’s own writings. In later life, the doughty demagogue became something of a nursery gardener himself, carrying on near Kensington, by the Kew road, a seed-farm from which he was zealous to propagate a kind of acacia he introduced, and also, with less success, the cultivation of maize under the name of “Cobbett’s corn.” All through life he kept up his interest in gardening, as shown by more than one of the works whose style has been happily compared to a kitchen-garden’s relation with a flower-garden. [Illustration: THE POPPY BEDS] Another gardener rose to note, who about the same time was seeking jobs in Mortlake, Kingston, or any parish around Kew where he could find poor lodging and ill-paid work. His real name was William Hunt, but he changed this to Huntingdon, as would appear, by way of hiding himself from the consequence of some youthful ill-doing; and he afterwards justified the _alias_ in characteristic fashion by claiming to have undergone “the new birth” under that assumed name, to which--“as I cannot get at D.D. for want of cash, neither can I get at M.A. for the want of learning”--he added the odd degree S.S., meaning “Sinner Saved.” After undergoing the pangs of spiritual labour along with hard troubles of the flesh at Ewell and Sunbury, he began to preach among his humble neighbours, and kept up this ministry while earning a livelihood by unloading coals at Thames Ditton, so that he became notorious as the converted coal-heaver. He rose to be the Spurgeon of his day, with John Bunyan rather for model, as far as one can judge from the twenty volumes of his works, little known to the “new theology” of our generation, which hardly remembers him unless from a casual allusion by Macaulay. He was indeed of a more fanatical and fuliginous spirit than would nowadays recommend a popular preacher; and his picture in the National Portrait Gallery suggests a coarsely strong animal nature, subdued, as it might be, by religious enthusiasm. So great grew his following that “Providence Chapel” was built for him in London, and rebuilt in Gray’s Inn Lane when destroyed by fire. Though he boasted