"The Lord's will be done! I don't think He intends thee to spend thy life at shoemaking. I have kept thee at school, and worked hard to get thee bread, and to let thee have thy own wish in learning, and never imagined that thou wast to be a shoemaker. But the Lord's will be done! He'll bring it all right in time." Such were the words with which the worthy and excellent mother of Thomas Cooper gave her consent to her boy's proposal that he should go and learn "the art, craft, and mystery of shoemaking." He had no particular love for the craft, but he was anxious to do something for a livelihood, and desirous of helping his widowed mother; and, above all, he was ashamed of being pointed at by his neighbors as "an idle good-for-nothing." That never was true of Thomas Cooper either in school or out, at work or recreation; and now that he had left school and was turned of fifteen years of age, he could not brook the insinuation that he was unwilling to work; so, good scholar as he was, and zealous for learning, and not without ambition, he resolved on doing _something_, however humble, to earn his bread, in order to shut the mouths of tattling neighbors. His mother had tried to get him apprenticed as a painter or a merchant's clerk, and failed for want of a premium; and he had made a brief experiment at sailoring down at Hull, and had come home again utterly loathing the cruelty and abuse to which a sailor-boy of those days was subjected; so there was nothing for him now but to take the first chance of learning any trade that came in his way. He was an only child, and his mother had been a widow eleven years, getting her living as a dyer, in which occupation she had assisted her husband during his lifetime. In the pursuit of his trade as a dyer he had moved about from town to town, and had met with his wife at Gainsborough in Lincolnshire. Not long after their marriage Mr. and Mrs. Cooper removed to Leicester, and took a house in Soar Lane, conveniently situated by the river Soar. Here Thomas, their only child, was born on the 20th of March, 1805. Twelve months afterward they went to live at Exeter, where the father died when his little boy was but four years old. After this his mother at once went back to old Gainsborough, where she would be near her relatives. Here she remained for the rest of her life, and here the first twenty-nine years of Thomas Cooper's life were spent.