his Southwell friends. This lady
had a large agate bead with a wire through it, which had been taken
out of a barrow, and lay always in her work-box. Lord Byron asking one
day what it was, she told him that it had been given her as an amulet,
and the charm was, that as long as she had this bead in her
possession, she should never be in love. "Then give it to me," he
cried, eagerly, "for that's just the thing I want." The young lady
refused;--but it was not long before the bead disappeared. She taxed
him with the theft, and he owned it; but said, she never should see
her amulet again.

Of his charity and kind-heartedness he left behind him at
Southwell--as, indeed, at every place, throughout life, where he
resided any time--the most cordial recollections. "He never," says a
person, who knew him intimately at this period, "met with objects of
distress without affording them succour." Among many little traits of
this nature, which his friends delight to tell, I select the
following,--less as a proof of his generosity, than from the interest
which the simple incident itself, as connected with the name of Byron,
presents. While yet a school-boy, he happened to be in a bookseller's
shop at Southwell, when a poor woman came in to purchase a Bible. The
price, she was told by the shopman, was eight shillings. "Ah, dear
sir," she exclaimed, "I cannot pay such a price; I did not think it
would cost half the money." The woman was then, with a look of
disappointment, going away,--when young Byron called her back, and
made her a present of the Bible.

In his attention to his person and dress, to the becoming arrangement
of his hair, and to whatever might best show off the beauty with which
nature had gifted him, he manifested, even thus early, his anxiety to
make himself pleasing to that sex who were, from first to last, the
ruling stars of his destiny. The fear of becoming, what he was
naturally inclined to be, enormously fat, had induced him, from his
first entrance at Cambridge, to adopt, for the purpose of reducing
himself, a system of violent exercise and abstinence, together with
the frequent use of warm baths. But the embittering circumstance of
his life,--that, which haunted him like a curse, amidst the buoyancy
of youth, and the anticipations of fame and pleasure, was, strange to
say, the trifling deformity of his foot. By that one slight blemish
(as in his moments of melancholy he persuaded himself) all the
blessings th