Charles Williams was one of those individuals who are "born to blush unseen." It is probable, therefore, that his name is unknown, and that his merits might have slept in obscurity but for us. We suspect that he has never been heard of before, and it is very likely that he never will be again. Charles had no long line of ancestors whose merits he could impute to himself. His great-grandfather had, to be sure, been the most noted wrestler in his day; and had annually won the belt at Bowness and at Keswick, but his prowess was forgot by all but his immediate descendants; and even his hard-earned belts had long since been cut up for repairing cart gear. Though Charles was only the son of a small farmer, yet there was one thing on which the family prided itself--there was a W. W. over the kitchen door which "Was a sartan sign," his mother argued, "et that hoos hed belengd to them sometime lang sen." There was one circumstance which we ought not to omit; particularly as it excited no inconsiderable interest, at the time, through all the neighbourhood of Kentmere. On the very day, and as far as we can ascertain, at the very hour, when Charles was born, a huge stone, self-moved, rolled down Wallow Crag into Hawes Water! The old women could and would account for it no other way than that he was born to be droond. Mr. Gough, who was then beginning to exhibit the first dawning of that genius which has procured him the esteem and admiration of all true lovers of rational philosophy, would gladly have convinced them that it was nothing but the effects of a thaw which had taken place only a few days before. But they argued that "Thear hed been many a tha afoar, but niver a stane rolled doon Wallow Crag afoar." Charles however grew up to be a boy, just as if this ominous stone had continued to sit secure on the mountain's ridge. But it might be said of him that "a strange and wayward wight was he." While other boys were ranging through the woods in pursuit of bird-nests, Charles would stretch himself on a smooth-faced rock, and pore on the adjacent landscape like one half crazed. To retire into a lonely wood behind his father's house, and teach a little brook, which ran through it, to take a thousand fantastic forms, was to Charles the sweetest recreation he could enjoy. The perpetual wings of time had now spread fifteen or sixteen winters over the vale of Kentmere, since the stone rolled into Hawes Water, and Charles was grown a tall and graceful boy. The little time which his father had spared him to school, had not been misemployed by the active youth; and though he felt a diffidence about entering into conversation, it was generally allowed that, when he did unloosen his tongue, he could argue any man in the valley, except the parson, who never stopt to hear anybody speak but himself, and the schoolmaster, who never spoke at all.