But besides that no human being can adequately
estimate the misery of leading a life of dependence upon one to whom
scolding was as the air she breathed, without it she must die, a
penurious dependence too, which supplied grudgingly the humblest wants,
and yet would not permit the exertions by which she would joyfully have
endeavoured to support herself;--besides the temptation to exchange Mrs.
Deborah's incessant maundering for the Miller's rough kindness, and her
scanty fare for the coarse plenty of his board,--besides these homely
but natural temptations--hardly to be adequately allowed for by those
who have passed their lives amidst smiling kindness and luxurious
abundance; besides these motives she had a stronger and dearer in her
desire to rescue her boy from the dangers of an enforced and miserable
idleness, and to put him in the way of earning his bread by honest
industry.

Through the interest of his grandfather the parish clerk, the little
Edward had been early placed in the Hilton free school, where he had
acquitted himself so much to the satisfaction of the master, that
at twelve years old he was the head boy on the foundation, and took
precedence of the other nine-and-twenty wearers of the full-skirted
blue coats, leathern belts, and tasseled caps, in the various arts of
reading, writing, cyphering, and mensuration. He could flourish a swan
without ever taking his pen from the paper. Nay, there is little doubt
but from long habit he could have flourished it blindfold, like the
man who had so often modelled the wit of Ferney in breadcrumbs, that he
could produce little busts of Voltaire with his hands under the table;
he had not his equal in Practice or the Rule of Three, and his piece,
when sent round at Christmas, was the admiration of the whole parish.

Unfortunately, his arrival at this pre-eminence was also the signal of
his dismissal from the free school. He returned home to his mother,
and as Mrs. Deborah, although hourly complaining of the expense of
supporting a great lubberly boy in idleness, refused to appentice him to
any trade, and even forbade his finding employment in helping her deaf
man of all work to cultivate her garden, which the poor lad, naturally
industrious and active, begged her permission to do, his mother,
considering that no uncertain expectations of money at the death of his
kinswoman could counterbalance the certain evil of dragging on his days
in penury and indolence during h