ngs, half-a-crown, and
sometimes more. This gave Will many little comforts. Once when my
sister took him his allowance, he told her how, when he was a young man,
a Gipsy woman told him he should be better off at the end of his life
than at the beginning; and "she spook truth," he said, "but how she knew
it I coon't saa." Will suffered at times from rheumatism, and had great
faith in some particular green herb pills, which were to be bought only
at one particular shop in Ipswich. My sister was once deputed to buy him
a box of these pills, and he told her afterwards, "Them there pills did
me a lot of good, and that show what fooks saa about rheumatics bein' in
the boones ain't trew, for how could them there pills 'a got into the
boones?" He was very fond of my father, whom he liked to joke with him.
"Mr Groome," he once said, "dew mob me so."

Will, like many other old people in the parish, believed in
witchcraft,--was himself, indeed, a "wise man" of a kind. My father once
told him about a woman who had fits. "Ah!" old Will said, "she've fallen
into bad hands." "What do you mean?" asked my father; and then Will said
that years before in Monk Soham there was a woman took bad just like this
one, and "there wern't but me and John Abbott in the place could git her
right." "What did you do?" said my father. "We two, John and I, sat by
a clear fire; and we had to bile some of the clippins of the woman's
nails and some of her hair; and when ta biled"--he paused. "What
happened?" asked my father; "did you hear anything?" "Hear anything! I
should think we did. When ta biled, we h'ard a loud shrike a-roarin' up
the chimley; and yeou may depind upon it, she warn't niver bad no more."

Once my father showed Will a _silhouette_ of his father, old Mr Groome of
Earl Soham, a portly gentleman, dressed in the old-fashioned style.
"Ruffles, who is this?" he asked, knowing that Will had known his father
well, and thinking he would recognise it. After looking at it carefully
for some time, Will said, "That's yar son, the sailor." My eldest
brother at that time might be something over twenty, and bore not the
faintest resemblance to our grandfather; still, Will knew that he had
been much abroad, and fancied a tropical sun might have blackened him.

By his own accounts, Will's feats of strength as a younger man, in the
way of reaping, mowing, &c., were remarkable; and there was one great
story, with much in it about "goolden