e up my mind," he says, "that she
was the very girl for me.... This matter was at once settled as firmly
as if written in the book of fate."

To this end he determines to leave the army as soon as possible. But
before he can effect this, the artillery-man is ordered back to England,
and his pretty daughter goes with him. But Cobbett has closed the
compact with her, and placed in her hands a hundred and fifty pounds of
his earnings,--a free gift, and an earnest of his troth.

The very next season, however, he meets, in a sweet rural solitude of
the Province, another charmer, with whom he dallies in a lovelorn way
for two years or more. He cannot quite forget the old; he cannot cease
befondling the new. If only the "remotest rumor had come," says he, "of
the faithlessness of the brunette in England, I should have been
fastened for life in the New-Brunswick valley." But no such rumor comes,
and in due time he bids a heart-rending adieu, and recrosses the ocean
to find his first love maid-of-all-work in a gentleman's family at five
pounds a year; and she puts in his hand, upon their first interview, the
whole of the hundred and fifty pounds, untouched. This rekindles his
admiration and respect for her judgment, and she becomes his wife,--a
wife he never ceases thereafter to love and honor.

He goes to France, and thence to America. Establishing himself in
Philadelphia, he enters upon the career of authorship, with a zeal for
the King, and a hatred of Dr. Franklin and all Democrats, which give him
a world of trouble. His foul bitterness of speech finds its climax at
length in a brutal onslaught upon Dr. Rush, for which he is prosecuted,
convicted, and mulcted in a sum that breaks down his bookselling and
interrupts the profits of his authorship.

He retires to England, opens shop in Pall-Mall, and edits the
"Porcupine," which bristles with envenomed arrows discharged against all
Liberals and Democrats. Again he is prosecuted, convicted, imprisoned.
His boys, well taught in all manner of farm-work, send him, from his
home in the country, hampers of fresh fruits, to relieve the tedium of
Newgate. Discharged at length, and continuing his ribaldry in the
columns of the "Register," he flies before an Act of Parliament, and
takes new refuge in America. He is now upon Long Island, earnest as in
his youth in agricultural pursuits. The late Dr. Francis of New York
used to speak of his visits to him, and of the fine vegetables he