may be degraded by frivolities and pleasures,
which are too often the foes of work. Hence we have usually to go to
out-of-the-way corners of the country for our hardest brain-workers.
Contact with the earth is a great restorer of power; and it is to the
country folks that we must ever look for the recuperative power of the
nation as regards health, vigour, and manliness.

Bainbridge is a remote country village, situated among the high lands
or Fells on the north-western border of Yorkshire. The mountains there
send out great projecting buttresses into the dales; and the waters
rush down from the hills, and form waterfalls or Forces, which Turner
has done so much to illustrate. The river Bain runs into the Yore at
Bainbridge, which is supposed to be the site of an old Roman station.
Over the door of the Grammar School is a mermaid, said to have been
found in a camp on the top of Addleborough, a remarkable limestone hill
which rises to the south-east of Bainbridge. It is in this
grammar-school that we find the subject of this little autobiography.
He must be allowed to tell the story of his life--which he describes as
'Work: Good, Bad, and Indifferent--in his own words:

"I was born on November 20th, 1853. In my childhood I suffered from
ill-health. My parents let me play about in the open air, and did not
put me to school until I had turned my sixth year. One day, playing in
the shoemaker's shop, William Farrel asked me if I knew my letters. I
answered 'No.' He then took down a primer from a shelf, and began to
teach me the alphabet, at the same time amusing me by likening the
letters to familiar objects in his shop. I soon learned to read, and
in about six weeks I surprised my father by reading from an easy book
which the shoemaker had given me.

"My father then took me into the school, of which he was master, and my
education may be said fairly to have begun. My progress, however, was
very slow partly owing to ill-health, but more, I must acknowledge, to
carelessness and inattention. In fact, during the first four years I
was at school, I learnt very little of anything, with the exception of
reciting verses, which I seemed to learn without any mental effort. My
memory became very retentive. I found that by attentively reading half
a page of print, or more, from any of the school-books, I could repeat
the whole of it without missing a word. I can scarcely explain how I
did it; but I think it was by payin