their ages or birthdays,
until we come to the record of the baptism of the youngest sister
Sarah. Happily her page came last of all, after the Sexton's jam was
finished, and thus Sarah's name escaped being made into the lid of a
jam-pot. But we will hope that the weaver and his wife remembered and
kept all their children's birthdays on the right days, even though
they are forgotten now. However that may have been, George's parents
'endeavoured to train him up, as they did their other children, in the
common way of worship--his mother especially being eminent for piety:
but even from a child he was seen to be of another frame of mind from
his brethren, for he was more religious, retired, still and solid, and
was also observing beyond his age. His mother, seeing this
extraordinary temper and godliness, which so early did shine through
him, so that he would not meddle with childish games, carried herself
indulgent towards him.... Meanwhile he learned to read pretty well,
and to write as much as would serve to signify his meaning to others.'

When he saw older people behaving in a rowdy, frivolous way, it
distressed him, and the little boy used to say to himself: 'If ever I
come to be a man, surely I will not be so wanton.'

'When I came to eleven years of age,' he says himself in his Journal,
'I knew pureness and righteousness; for while I was a child I was
taught how to walk so as to be kept pure, and to be faithful in two
ways, both inwardly to God, and outwardly to man, and to keep to Yea
and Nay in all things.'

At that time there was a law obliging everybody to attend Church on
Sundays, and as the services lasted for several hours at a time, the
weaver's children doubtless had time to look about them, and learned
to know the stones of the old church well. When the Squire and his
family were at home they sat in the Purefoy Chapel in the North Aisle.
From this Chapel a door in the wall opened on to a path that led
straight over the drawbridge across the moat to the Manor House. It
must have been interesting for all the village children to watch for
the opening and shutting of that door. But up in the chancel there
was, and still is, something even more interesting: the big tomb that
a certain Mistress Jocosa or Joyce Purefoy had put up to the memory of
her husband, who had died in the days of good Queen Bess.

'PURE FOY, MA JOYE,' the black letters of the family motto, can still
be read on a marble scroll. If Georg