“First Tuesday in the next October, Now do not doubt but we’ll be sober! If Providence permits us action, You may depend upon AN AUCTION, At the stall That’s occupied by WILLIAM HALL. To enumerate a task would be, So best way is to come and see; But not to come too vague an errant, We’ll give a sketch which we will warrant. “About _one hundred books_, in due lots, And pretty near the same in _shoe-lasts_; _Coats_, _waistcoats_, _breeches_, shining _buttons_, Perhaps ten thousand _leather cuttings_. Sold at per pound, your lot but ask it, Shall be weigh’d to you in a basket; Some lots of _tools_, to make a try on. About one hundred weight of _iron_; _Scales_, _earthenware_, _arm-chairs_, a _tea-urn_, _Tea-chests_, a _herring-tub_, and so on; With various more, that’s our intention, Which are too tedious here to mention. “N. B. To undeceive, ’fore you come nigher, The duty charg’d upon the buyer; And, should we find we’re not perplext, We’ll keep it up the Tuesday next.” During repeated visits to his surviving relatives in his native fens, he observed the altered appearance of the scene from the improved method of drainage. It had become like “another world,” and he resolved ------------------ “to try His talent for posterity;” and “make a book,” under the title of “The Low Fen Journal,” to comprise “a chain of Incidents relating to the State of the Fens, from the earliest Account to the present Time.” As a specimen of the work he published, in the summer of 1812, an octavo pamphlet of twenty-four pages, called a “Sketch of Local History,” by “_Will. Will-be-so_,” announcing “If two hundred subscribers will give in their aid, The whole of this journal is meant to be laid Under public view.” This curious pamphlet of odds and ends in prose and rhyme, without order or arrangement, contained a “caution to the buyer.” “Let any read that will not soil or rend it, But should they ask to borrow, _pray don’t lend it_! Advise them, ‘_Go and buy_;’ ’twill better suit My purpose; and with you prevent dispute. With me a maxim ’tis, he that won’t buy Does seldom well regard his neighbour’s property; And did you chew the bit, so much as I do From lending books, I think ’twould make you shy too.” In the course of the tract, he presented to “the critics” the following admonitory address.