Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/513

PROVINCIAL BOOKSELLERS. 471 could get no employment in his own avocations, he determined to start afresh as a bookbinder. His friends sneered at his ambitious hopes, but his sister supported him firmly. There were no binding tools to be purchased then in the country, so his sister " raised three guineas, sewed them in my shirt-collar, for there was no doubt but I should be robbed," and put eleven shillings in his pocket as a sop to the ex- pected highwayman, and off he started for London, walking fifty-one miles the first day and reaching it on the third. Here he invested his three guineas in tools, and stayed three days, seeing all that could be seen for nothing, his only paid entertainment being a visit to Bedlam, which cost a penny. Three days more, and he was back at Nottingham, terribly worn- out and footsore, but with four-pence still remaining out of his little travelling fund. He now took a small shop, fourteen miles from Nottingham, at an annual rent of twenty shillings, and " in one day became the most eminent bookseller in Southwell," but he still lived at Nottingham. " During the rainy winter months," he says, " I set out from Nottingham at five every Saturday morning, carried a burthen of from three to thirty pounds' weight to Southwell, opened shop at ten, starved it all day upon bread, cheese, and half a pint of ale ; took from is. to 6s., shut up at four, and by trudging through the solitary night and the deep roads five hours more, I arrived at Nottingham by nine, where I always found a mess of milk-porridge by the fire, prepared by my valuable sister. But nothing short of resolution and rigid economy could have carried me through this scene." There was little profit, however, in such a life,