Page:Memoirs James Hardy Vaux.djvu/33

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was now taken from school, the excessive fondness of my dear parents not being able to brook a longer separation from me. I found these kind benefactors in private lodgings, they having quitted my father's house on account of family disagreements. The latter had relinquished the hat business, by which he was minus some hundreds of pounds; and after a short lapse of time, he embarked in a very different trade, that of a tallow-chandler, of which he had conceived favourable ideas: in this too, he failed of success, and was equally unfortunate in several subsequent speculations, by which means he considerably impoverished himself; however he continued to maintain appearances with tolerable credit until his decease. I shall now take leave of my father, mother, and sisters, for the present, their history having no further connexion with my own life, as I never again became an inmate of their family.

After a short residence in ———— square, my grandfather, on account of his wife's declining health, and with a view to economy in house-keeping, that he might be more liberal in his bounty to myself, thought fit to remove to Wisbeach in Cambridgeshire, where an old schoolfellow of his resided, who had strongly pressed this measure. Here he took a neat little house ready furnished, and placed me under the tuition of a clergyman in the town, whose school I attended daily.