Liskeard. Mr. Laffer was the son of the squire at Altarnun he afterwards became incumbent of St. Gennys. At this time he was head master of the Liskeard Grammar School. There Robert Hawker was happy. He spent his holidays either with his father at Stratton, or with his grandfather and aunt at Plymouth. At Stratton he was the torment of an old fellow who kept a shop in High Street, where he sold groceries, crockery, and drapery. One day he slipped into the house when the old man was out, and found a piece of mutton roasting before the fire. Robert took it off the crook, hung it up in the shop, and placed a bundle of dips before the fire, to roast in its place.

He would dive into the shop, catch hold of the end of thread that curled out of the tin in which the shopkeeper kept the ball of twine with which he tied up his parcels, and race with it in his hand down the street, then up a lane and down another, till he had uncoiled it all, and laced Stratton in a cobweb of twine, tripping up people as they went along the streets. The old fellow had not the wits to cut the thread, but held on like grim death to the tin, whilst the ball bounced and uncoiled within it, swearing at the plague of a boy, and wishing him "back to skule again."

"I doan't care whether I ring the bells on the king's birthday," said the parish clerk, another victim of the boy's pranks; "but if I never touch the ropes again, I'll give a peal when Robert goes to skule, and leaves Stratton folks in peace."

As may well be believed, the mischievous, high

spirited boy played tricks on his brothers and sisters. The clerk was accustomed to read in church, "I am an alien unto my mother's children," pronouncing "alien" as "a lion." "Ah!" said Mrs. Hawker, "that means Robert: he is verily a lion unto his mother's children."

"I do not know how it is," said his brother one day: "when I go out with Robert nutting, he gets all the nuts; and when I go out rabbiting, he gets all the rabbits; and when we go out fishing together, he catches all the fish."

"Come with me fishing to-morrow, Claud," said Robert, "and see if you don't have luck."

Next day he surreptitiously fastened a red herring to his brother's hook; and, when it was drawn out of the water, "There!" exclaimed Robert, "you are twice as lucky as I am. My fish are all raw; and yours is ready cleaned, smoked, and salted."

The old vicarage at Stratton is now pulled down: it stood at the east end of the chancel, and the garden has been thrown into the burial-ground.

At Stratton he got one night into the stable of the surgeon, hogged the mane, and painted the coat of his horse like a zebra with white and black oil paint. Then he sent a message to the doctor, as if from a great house at a distance, requiring his immediate attendance. The doctor was obliged to saddle and gallop off the horse in the condition in which he found it, thinking that there was not time for him to stay till the coat was cleaned of paint.

His pranks at Plymouth led at last to his grandfather refusing to have him any longer in his house.

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Robert held the good pious ladies, who swarmed round the doctor, in aversion. It was the time of sedan-chairs; and trains of old spinsters and dowagers used to fill the street in their boxes between bearers, on the occasions of missionary teas, Dorcas meetings, and private expositions of the Word. Robert used to open the house-door, and make a sign to the bearers to stop. A row of a dozen or more sedans were thus arrested in the street. Then the boy would go to the sedans in order, open the window, and, thrusting his head in, kiss the fair but venerable occupant, and then start back in mock dismay, exclaiming, "A thousand pardons! I thought you were my mother. I am sorry. How could I have made such a mistake, you are so much older?"

Sometimes, with the gravest face, he would tell the bearers that the lady was to be conveyed to the Dockyard, or the Arsenal, or to the Hoe; and she would find herself deposited among anchors and ropes, or cannon-balls, or on the windy height overlooking the bay, instead of at the doctor's door.

Two old ladies, spinster sisters, Robert believed were setting their caps at the doctor, then a widower. He took an inveterate dislike to them, and their insinuating, oily manner with his grandfather; and he worried them out of Plymouth.

He did it thus. One day he called on one of the leading physicians in Plymouth, and told him that Miss Hephzibah Jenkins had slipped on a piece of orange-peel, broken her leg, and needed his instant attention. He arrived out of breath with running, very red; and, it being known that the Misses Jen

kins were intimate friends of Dr. Hawker, the physician went off at once to the lady, with splints and bandages.

Next day another medical man was sent to see Miss Sidonia Jenkins. Every day a fresh surgeon or physician arrived to bind up legs and arms and heads, or revive the ladies from extreme prostration, pleurisy, inflammation of the lungs, heart-complaint, &c., till every medical man in Plymouth, Stonehouse, and Devonport had been to the house of the spinsters. When they were exhausted, an undertaker was sent to measure the old ladies for their coffins; and next day a hearse drew up at their door to convey them to their graves, which had been dug according to order in the St. Andrew's churchyard.

This was more than the ladies could bear. They shut up the house, and left Plymouth. But this was also the end of Robert's stay with his grandfather. The good doctor had endured a great deal, but he would not put up with this; and Robert was sent to Stratton, to his father.

When the boy left school at Liskeard, he was articled to a lawyer, Mr. Jacobson, at Plymouth, a wealthy man in good practice, first cousin to his mother; but this sort of profession did not at all approve itself to Robert's taste, and he only remained with Mr. Jacobson a few months. Whether he then turned his thoughts towards going into holy orders, cannot be told; but he persuaded his aunt, Mrs. Hodgson, to send him to Cheltenham Grammar School.

The boy had great abilities, and a passionate love

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of books, but wanted application. He read a great deal, but his reading was desultory. He was, however, a good classic scholar. To mathematics he took a positive dislike, and never could master a proposition in Euclid. At Cheltenham he wrote some poems, and published them in a little book entitled " Tendrils, by Reuben." They appeared in 1821, when he was seventeen years old.

From Cheltenham, Robert S. Hawker went to Oxford, 1823, and entered at Pembroke; but his father was only a poor curate, and unable to maintain him at the university. Robert was determined to finish his course there. He could not command the purse of his aunt Mrs. Hodgson, who was dead; and when he retired to Stratton for his long vacation in 1824, his father told him that it was impossible for him to send him back to the university.

But Robert Hawker had made up his mind that finish his career at college he would. He had recourse to the following expedient:

There lived at Whitstone, near Holdsworthy, four Miss I'ans, daughters of Col. I'ans. They had been left with an annuity of two hundred pounds apiece, as well as lands and a handsome place. At the time when Mr. Jacob Hawker announced to his son that a return to Oxford was impossible, the four ladies were at Efford, near Bude, a farm and house leased from Sir Thomas Acland. Directly that Robert Hawker learnt his father's decision, without waiting to put on his hat, he ran from Stratton to Bude, arrived hot and blown at Efford, and proposed to Miss Charlotte I'ans to become his wife. The lady was then aged