if, through kinship or interest, an apprenticeship offered in the house of a big tradesman in London. Not a few, indeed, of the famous London apprentices we hear so much about were country gentlemen’s sons. More found occupations in their own district, in such lines, for instance, as the great Severn trade, with its boat-loads of caps and crockery, butter and cheese, iron and Virginia tobacco, passing back and forth between Bridgnorth, Bewdley, Worcester, Gloucester, and Bristol, and the squire himself very often took a share in such ventures. Others became millers, maltsters, tanners, glovers, or even shopkeepers in the country towns. Some rented farms, which meant a very different existence for them and their wives from that which would be entailed by a similar proceeding in the same class of life to-day. Most of my own generation, I fancy, grew up with a hazy notion that Cromwell was a plebeian because he was a country brewer or the like. There are, perhaps, plenty of well-informed adults even now who do not realise that he was not merely of a landed family but of a wealthy and powerful one which had sumptuously entertained King James at Hinchingbrooke, though originally sprung from plain Glamorgan squires. For the son of a younger son, Cromwell, _alias_ Williams, seems to have been exceptionally well endowed. Attorneys and surgeons too occur fairly often in family records, or as marrying squires’ daughters, and parsons of course are well in evidence. Simple arithmetic precludes the possibility of more than one eldest son in the matrimonial market for each family of girls. Some of their marriages would, I feel sure, surprise those who vaguely imagine that things in this particular were not merely as now, or as yesterday if you like, but ‘more so.’ In the maritime counties, particularly the western ones, the sea no doubt attracted many a younger son. The Newfoundland fisheries, long before our North American Colonies were founded and for over a century afterwards, were of enormous importance to Devonshire, for this was a Mediterranean as well as a home trade. It is said that a third of the eligible manhood of the county disappeared thence in April to return in November, while squires with loose cash became part owners in ships, and their sons frequently sailed in them. The constant wars in Ireland during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with their chances of loot and land, must also have attracted a good many young gentlemen. But of the hundred and odd English purchasers of estates in the six Plantation counties of Ulster the outlay was too large for the ordinary younger son, so far as one can judge from the list of planters, the particulars concerning them and the prices paid, as given in the Government survey of the day.[2]