I was always my father’s favorite.  He took a delight, to the very last, in recounting the little sagacious tricks and innocent artifices of my childhood.  One manifestation thereof I never heard him repeat without tears of joy trickling down his cheeks.  It seems, that, when I quitted the parental roof, (August 27th, 1788,) being then six years and not quite a month old, to proceed to the Free School at Warwick, where my father was a sort of trustee, my mother—­as mothers are usually provident on these occasions—­had stuffed the pockets of the coach, which was to convey me and six more children of my own growth that were going to be entered along with me at the same seminary, with a prodigious quantity of gingerbread, which I remember my father said was more than was needed:  and so, indeed, it was; for, if I had been to eat it all myself, it would have got stale and mouldly before it had been half spent.  The consideration whereof set me upon my contrivances how I might secure to myself as much of the gingerbread as would keep good for the next two or three days, and yet none of the rest in a manner be wasted.  I had a little pair of pocket-compasses, which I usually carried about me for the purpose of making draughts and measurements, at which I was always very ingenious, of the various engines and mechanical inventions in which such a town as Birmingham abounded.  By the means of these, and a small penknife which my father had given me, I cut out the one half of the cake, calculating that the remainder would reasonably serve my turn; and subdividing it into many little slices, which were curious to see for the neatness and niceness of their proportion, I sold it out in so many pennyworths to my young companions as served us all the way to Warwick, which is a distance of some twenty miles from this, town:  and very merry, I assure you, we made ourselves with it, feasting all the way.  By this honest stratagem, I put double the prime cost of the gingerbread into my purse, and secured as much as I thought would keep good and moist for my next two or three days’ eating.  When I told this to my parents, on their first visit to me at Warwick, my father (good man) patted me on the cheek, and stroked my head, and seemed as if he could never make enough of me; but my mother unaccountably burst into tears, and said “it was a very niggardly action,” or some such expression, and that “she would rather it would please God to take me”—­meaning, God help me, that I should die—­“than that she should live to see me grow up a mean man”:  which shows the difference of parent from parent, and how some mothers are more harsh and intolerant to their children than some fathers,—­when we might expect quite the contrary.  My father, however, loaded me with presents from that time, which made me the envy of my school-fellows.  As I felt this growing disposition in them, I naturally sought to avert it by all the means in my power; and from that time I used to eat my little packages of fruit