Page:The Leadbeater Papers (1862) Vol 1.djvu/58

Aldborough Wrightson, whose short but eventful history makes no uninteresting part of the village annals, was born in 1746; and, with his elder brother Thomas, was sent to Ballitore school in 1754. He was a beautiful sprightly child. Aldborough went to college, but on his brother's death, his father, a wealthy alderman, wished him to supply the vacant place in his counting-house; and his mother would have desired him to go of her errands to her milliner and manteau-maker, and to attend her in that round of diversions which, in one of his last letters, he said "had frittered away her understanding." His high spirit and taste for letters not corresponding with their views, he became irregular in his habits; which would have been freely pardoned by his parents had he entered into their plans, but as he did not, these irregularities. served as a pretext for holding him at a distance, though once their beloved, and now their only son. It is just within the compass of my memory his being taken dangerously ill, either with a spitting of blood which brought him very low, or with a mortification in his thumb which was afterwards amputated, and for which operation he strove to prepare himself by the Stoic philosophy that pain was no evil. At one of those times his father and mother came down for him; not so soon as he expected, it seems, for the idea presents itself to my memory of the languishing youth reclined in a straw arm-chair, and his mother rushing into the parlour with maternal haste, wringing her hands, and exclaiming, "Did you not think we were