“Passing off what had been shortened by others was his ruin; for once, in trying to pass off a broad piece which had been laid in aquafortis for four-and-twenty hours, and was very black, not having been properly rectified, he was stopped and searched, and other reduced coins being found about him, and in his lodgings, he was committed to prison, tried and executed. He was offered his life, provided he would betray his comrades; but he told the big-wigs, who wanted him to do so, that he would see them farther first, and died at Tyburn, amidst the cheers of the populace, leaving my grandmother and father, to whom he had always been a kind husband and parent—for, setting aside the crime for which he suffered, he was a moral man—leaving them, I say, to bewail his irreparable loss. “’Tis said that misfortune never comes alone; this is, however, not always the case. Shortly after my grandfather’s misfortune, as my grandmother and her son were living in great misery in Spitalfields, her only relation—a brother from whom she had been estranged some years, on account of her marriage with my grandfather, who had been in an inferior station to herself—died, leaving all his property to her and the child. This property consisted of a farm of about a hundred acres, with its stock, and some money besides. My grandmother, who knew something of business, instantly went into the country, where she farmed the property for her own benefit and that of her son, to whom she gave an education suitable to a person in his condition, till he was old enough to manage the farm himself. Shortly after the young man came of age, my grandmother died, and my father, in about a year, married the daughter of a farmer, from whom he expected some little fortune, but who very much deceived him, becoming a bankrupt almost immediately after the marriage of his daughter, and himself and family going to the workhouse.