“It certainly was not Will Skinner’s beauty,” writes Mary Mitford, “that caught my fancy. His person was hardly of the kind to win a lady’s favour, even although that lady were only four years of age.... Good old man! I see him in my mind’s eye at this moment: lean, wrinkled, shabby, poor, slow of speech, and ungainly of aspect, yet pleasant to look at and delightful to recollect. It was the overflowing kindness of his temper that rendered Will Skinner so general a favourite. Poor he was certainly and lonely, for he had been crossed in love in his youth, and lived alone in his little tenement, with no other companions than his wig blocks and a tame starling. ‘Pretty company’ he used to call them. [Illustration: MARY RUSSELL MITFORD _From a miniature_] “His fortunes had at one time assumed a more flourishing aspect when the Bishop of Exeter and Rector of Alresford had employed him to superintend the ‘posting’ of his wig, and had also promoted him to the posts of sexton and of deputy parish clerk. But on the death of the Bishop, and on the advent of the French Revolution, when cropped heads came into fashion and powder and hairdressing went out, poor Will found himself nearly at his wit’s end. In this dilemma he resolved to turn his hand to other employments, and, living in the neighbourhood of a famous trout stream, he applied himself to the construction of artificial flies. “This occupation he usually followed in his territory the churchyard, a place ... occupying a gentle eminence by the side of Cranley Down—a down on which the cricketers of that cricketing country used to muster two elevens for practice, almost every fine evening, from Easter to Michaelmas. Thither Will, who had been a cricketer himself in his youth, and still loved the wind of a ball, used to resort on summer afternoons, perching himself on a large square raised monument, a spreading lime tree above his head, Izaak Walton before him, and his implements of trade at his side. There he sat, now manufacturing a cannon-fly, and now watching Tom Taylor’s unparagoned bowling. “On this spot our intimacy commenced. A spoilt child and an only child, it was my delight to escape from nurse and nursery and to follow everywhere the dear papa, [even] to the cricket ground, in spite of all remonstrance, causing him no small perplexity as to how to bestow me in safety during the game. Will and the monument seemed to offer exactly the desired refuge, and our good neighbour readily consented to fill the post of deputy nursery-maid for the time, assisted in his superintendence by our very beautiful and sagacious black Newfoundland dog called Coe....