business rounds when the weather was fine; poring over Baskerville's quarto Bible with its fine engravings from the old masters, when compelled on wet Sundays to stop indoors, the sensitive mind of the eager child received its first impressions of the beautiful in nature and art. When he was eight years of age his mother succeeded in getting him admitted to a new Free School, recently opened in the town, and little Tom was placed upon the foundation as a "Bluecoat" scholar. The course of instruction at this school was neither varied nor profound, consisting entirely of Scripture reading, writing, and the first four rules of arithmetic; but its frequent repetitions of spelling and ciphering lessons were good as a beginning, and laid a fair basis for future learning. Obliged to attend the parish church with the rest of the "Bluecoats," he became enamoured with the stately service of the Church of England, the superior singing, and the grand old organ; and great was his delight when he was chosen, on account of his good voice and musical ear, to sit with six other boys in the choir by the organ up in the gallery of the church. During these three years, from the age of eight to eleven, he began to read for pleasure or profit such books as the immortal "Pilgrim's Progress," or Baines's "History of the War," "Pamela," and the "Earl of Moreland," and to revel in such ballads as "Chevy Chase," which were committed to memory and repeated when alone, and served to stir up in his young heart the poetic or the warlike spirit. But these were years of severe trial too, for the great wars were then raging on the Continent; taxes pressed with terrible weight on all classes, but especially on the poor; and, added to these troubles, were the evils of bad harvests and winters unusually severe. It was hard indeed for his mother to make a living in such times, and to provide the barest subsistence for herself and child. "At one time," he says, "wheaten flour rose to six shillings per stone, and we tried to live on barley-cakes, which brought on a burning, gnawing pain at the stomach. For two seasons the corn was spoiled in the fields with wet; and when the winter came, we could scoop out the middle of the soft distasteful loaf, and to eat it brought on sickness. Meat was so dear that my mother could not buy it, and often our dinner consisted of potatoes alone." In three years the little Bluecoat boy had grown weary of the monotonous round of teaching at the Free School, and got his mother's consent to attend a better class of school for boys, kept by a man who was known among his pupils and the neighbors as "Daddy Briggs." Here there was talk of such abstruse subjects as _mensuration_ and _algebra_; "Enfield's Speaker" was used for reading, and the scholars went deeply into the histories of Greece and Rome and England, led on by that profound and original historian, Goldsmith! However, the school was an