mes shortened money, and at other times passed off
what had been shortened by other gentry.

'Passing off what had been shortened by others was his ruin; for once, in
trying to pass off a broad piece which had been laid in aquafortis for
four-and-twenty hours, and was very black, not having been properly
rectified, he was stopped and searched, and other reduced coins being
found about him and in his lodgings, he was committed to prison, tried,
and executed. He was offered his life, provided he would betray his
comrades, but he told the big-wigs, who wanted him to do so, that he
would see them farther first, and died at Tyburn, amidst the cheers of
the populace, leaving my grandmother and father, to whom he had always
been a kind husband and parent--for, setting aside the crime for which he
suffered, he was a moral man--leaving them, I say, to bewail his
irreparable loss.

''Tis said that misfortune never comes alone; this is, however, not
always the case. Shortly after my grandfather's misfortune, as my
grandmother and her son were living in great misery in Spitalfields, her
only relation--a brother from whom she had been estranged some years, on
account of her marriage with my grandfather, who had been in an inferior
station to herself--died, leaving all his property to her and the child.
This property consisted of a farm of about a hundred acres, with its
stock and some money besides. My grandmother, who knew something of
business, instantly went into the country, where she farmed the property
for her own benefit and that of her son, to whom she gave an education
suitable to a person in his condition, till he was old enough to manage
the farm himself. Shortly after the young man came of age, my
grandmother died, and my father, in about a year, married the daughter of
a farmer, from whom he expected some little fortune, but who very much
deceived him, becoming a bankrupt almost immediately after the marriage
of his daughter, and himself and family going to the workhouse.

'My mother, however, made my father an excellent wife; and if my father
in the long run did not do well, it was no fault of hers. My father was
not a bad man by nature, he was of an easy, generous temper--the most
unfortunate temper, by-the-by, for success in this life that any person
can be possessed of, as those who have it are almost sure to be made
dupes of by the designing. But, though easy and generous, he was
anything but a fool; he had