consented to dismount at the end of every ten miles to stretch his
limbs. Sidling up to Sergeant Earl, as there was no greater man for him
to toady, Francis North offered himself as the old man's travelling
companion from the university to the manufacturing town; and when Earl
with a grim smile accepted the courteous suggestion, the young man
congratulated himself. On the following morning, however, he had reason
to question his good fortune when the sergeant's clerk brought him a
cake, and remarked, significantly, "Put it in your pocket, sir; you'll
want it; for my master won't draw bit till he comes to Norwich." It was
a hard day's work; but young Frank North was rewarded for his civility
to the sergeant, who condescended to instruct his apt pupil in the
tricks and chicaneries of their profession. "Sir," inquired North at the
close of the excursion, emboldened by the rich man's affability, "by
what system do you keep your accounts, which must be very complex, as
you have lands, securities, and great comings-in of all kinds?"
"Accounts! boy," answered the grey-headed curmudgeon; "I get as much as
I can, and I spend as little as I can; that's how I keep my accounts."

When North had raised himself to the Chiefship of the Common Pleas he
chose the Western Circuit, "not for the common cause, it being a long
circuit, and beneficial for the officers and servants, but because he
knew the gentlemen to be loyal and conformable, and that he should have
fair quarter amongst them;" and so much favor did he win amongst the
loyal and conformable gentry that old Bishop Mew--the prelate of
Winchester, popularly known as Bishop _Patch_, because he always wore a
patch of black court-plaster over the scar of a wound which he received
on one of his cheeks, whilst fighting as a trooper for Charles I.--used
to term him the "Deliciae occidentis, or Darling of the West." On one
occasion this Darling of the West was placed in a ludicrous position by
the alacrity with which he accepted an invitation from "a busy fanatic,"
a Devonshire gentleman, of good family, and estate, named Duke. This
"busy fanatic" invited the judges on circuit and their officers to dine
and sleep at his mansion on their way to Exeter, and subsequently
scandalized his guests--all of them of course zealous defenders of the
Established Church--by reading family-prayers before supper. "The
gentleman," says the historian, "had not the manners to engage the
parish minister t