From the Carters we turn to a man of a very different type, who made his way to wealth by sterling integrity and honesty of purpose. William Lemon was born at Germoe in 1696, and baptized in Breage Church on the 15th November of the same year. He received his education at the village school, and being a lad of quick intelligence, he became in the first instance a clerk to a Mr. Coster, connected with the local mining industry. He distinguished himself when a mere boy on the occasion of a ship being driven on Praa Sands in the midst of a terrific gale. He and a party of brave men, who arrived on the scene of the disaster as the ship was quickly breaking to pieces, formed themselves with great gallantry into a living chain, extending from the shore into the raging, angry surf, and so were able to grasp and save the shipwrecked sailors as they were carried on the waves to the shore. But for these heroic men thus grasping them they would have been sucked back into the sea and drowned in the receding waters. Young William Lemon was a lad of thoughtful and studious disposition, and availed himself of every opportunity to learn what there was to be learnt of assaying and mine engineering in the district. Presumably men of education and practical ability were very scarce in the neighbourhood at this time; at any rate, whilst little more than a boy he was appointed the manager of considerable tin smelting works in the neighbourhood of Penzance. At the age of twenty-eight he married a Miss Isabella Vibart, of Tolver, in Gulval, a lady of some property. William Lemon was endowed with breadth of mind and grasp of detail in a marked degree, and the means which his wife brought him enabled him to bring these faculties into play with the most successful results. He embarked on prudent and far-sighted mining speculations, which quickly made him a man of great wealth. He conceived the idea of working the tin mines on a large scale, and not as hitherto by small bands or companies of "adventurers," as had been the custom for some generations. Though great wealth came to him comparatively early, his character continued unchanged and unspoilt, and in the midst of his successes he continued to utilize his leisure in the study of Latin, and in his middle-age he had attained to no mean knowledge of that tongue. In the present age the successful developer of mines and floater of mining companies, spending his leisure in the study of the classics, would be indeed regarded as strange, but "_autres temps, autres mœurs_."