His own father once carried the fattest man in the parish on his back half a mile; I forget how much he weighed exactly, but it was something enormous, and the fat man, moreover, held a 56 lb.

weight in each hand.

He himself remembered when Hilary used to be the strongest man in the place; when the young men met together they contended who should lift the heaviest weight, and he had seen Hilary raise 5 cwt., fair lifting, with the hands only, and without any mechanical appliance.

Hilary, too, used to write his name with a carpenter's flat cedar pencil on the whitewashed ceiling of the brewhouse, holding the while a 1/2 cwt.

of iron hung on his little finger.