With such thoughts, though but a very little lad, Diggory used to ramble, when school was up, about pleasant Nottingham, where he was born, and about its charming neighbourhood. His father was only a poor lace-weaver; but an affectionate and almost overweening fondness for their only child rendered his parents prompt to sacrifice any personal comfort, in order to secure him a respectable portion of education. The lad was, therefore, kept steadily at school. But his father mingled no little of the eccentric in his constitution, as may be guessed from the name he gave his child, for he had no "family reason" for it; and so it happened, which was not at all the worse, that the lad was not left to gather his knowledge simply from the dry and barren teaching of a day-school. His father was a dabbler in the mathematics, in astronomy, in dialling, in botany and floriculture, in history and antiquities; and so Dig Lawson caught a tincture of each of these knowledges, at such seasons as his father felt disposed to communicate what he knew of them. Nor did the irregularity of communication in his father's fragmentary hints prevent the lad's mind and its stores from taking a regular form. That form was somewhat unique, perhaps, but a true philosopher would have thought it symmetrical. The lad did not forget his humble condition: he was never proud: but his thinkings were far more exalted than those of the majority of the children who were, at times, his playmates. The greater part of his leisure was spent in lonely wanderings. And if any locality in England can tend to elevate the sentiments of its young habitants, one would think it to be Nottingham. Such was its effect, however, on the mind of young Dig Lawson: he became a vehicle of noble, though somewhat romantic thinkings, while wandering in the meadows by the beautiful Trent, and watching, alternately, the ripple of the stream, or the unfolding of some beautiful flower that grew on its border; or rambling over the wildernesses of the Forest-ground, so classically English, and giving himself up, for the nonce, to day-dreams of Robin Hood, till he half imagined he saw the merry band tripping over the hill-side among the furze and stunted trees, clad in their Lincoln green, and heard the real sound of bold Robin's bugle; or climbing the rocks that project round the beautiful park, and looking up at "Mortimer's Hole" in the castled cliff, and picturing the chivalrous attack on the concealed traitor by the mailed bands of the third Edward; or creeping among the strange-looking Druid caves on the border of the silver Lene, and conjuring up in his imagination the white-bearded priests crowned with oak, and bearing the "mistletoe bough," and chanting the hymn to the sun or moon, while a crowd of painted Britons struck up the chorus "Derry-down." Less florid but more substantial thinkings often occupied him, when he watched the last rays of the setting sun tint up the windows of the modern building