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She proclaimed this resolution at the rate of twelve times an hour, (that is to say, once in five minutes,) every day for a fortnight; and in spite of her well-known caprice, there seemed for once in her life reason to believe that she would keep her word.

Those prudent and sagacious persons who are so good as to take the superintendence of other people’s affairs, and to tell by the look of the foot where the shoe pinches and where it does not, all united in blaming the poor widow for withdrawing herself and her son from Mrs. Deborah’s protection. 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 her life, wisely determined to betake herself to the mill, and accept John Stokes’s offer of sending Edward to a friend in town, for the purpose of being placed with a civil engineer:–a destination with which the boy himself–a fine intelligent youth, by the way, tall and manly, with black eyes that talked and laughed, and curling dark hair,–was delighted in every point of view. He longed for a profession for which he had a decided turn; he longed to see the world as personified by the city of cities, the unparagoned London; and he longed more than either to get away from Aunt Deborah, the storm of whose vituperation seemed ringing in his ears so long as he continued within sight of her dwelling. One would think the clack of the mill and the prattle of his pretty cousin Cicely might have drowned it, but it did not. Nothing short of leaving the spinster fifty miles behind, and setting the great city between him and her, could efface the impression.