ial soil of his ancestors. A regular
certificate appears, thus entered in the Church-Book at Lupton
Magna:--'_Johannes, filius Habakkuk et Rebecccae Liston, Dissentientium,
natus quinto Decembri_, 1780, _baptizatus sexto Februarii sequentis;
Sponsoribus J. et W. Woollaston, una cum Maria Merryweather_.' The
singularity of an Anabaptist minister conforming to the child-rites of
the Church would have tempted me to doubt the authenticity of this
entry, had I not been obliged with the actual sight of it, by the favor
of Mr. Minns, the intelligent and worthy parish-clerk of Lupton.
Possibly some expectation in point of worldly advantages from some of
the sponsors might have induced this unseemly deviation, as it must have
appeared, from the practice and principles of that generally rigid sect.
The term _Dissentientium_ was possibly intended by the orthodox
clergyman as a slur upon the supposed inconsistency. What, or of what
nature, the expectations we have hinted at may have been, we have now no
means of ascertaining. Of the Woollastons no trace is now discoverable
in the village. The name of Merryweather occurs over the front of a
grocer's shop at the western extremity of Lupton.

"Of the infant Liston we find no events recorded before his fourth year,
in which a severe attack of the measles bid fair to have robbed the
rising generation of a fund of innocent entertainment. He had it of the
confluent kind, as it is called, and the child's life was for a week or
two despaired of. His recovery he always attributes (under Heaven) to
the humane interference of one Doctor Wilhelm Richter, a German empiric,
who, in this extremity, prescribed a copious diet of _sauer-kraut_,
which the child was observed to reach at with avidity, when other food
repelled him; and from this change of diet his restoration was rapid and
complete. We have often heard him name the circumstance with gratitude;
and it is not altogether surprising that a relish for this kind of
aliment, so abhorrent and harsh to common English palates, has
accompanied him through life. When any of Mr. Listen's intimates invite
him to supper, he never fails of finding, nearest to his knife and fork,
a dish of _sauer-kraut_.

"At the age of nine we find our subject under the tuition of the Rev.
Mr. Goodenough, (his father's health not permitting him probably to
instruct him himself,) by whom he was inducted into a competent portion
of Latin and Greek, with some mathematics,