can soon see, that of all spectacles this is the one least to his
mind. "If you waste five minutes, that is not much; but probably if
you waste five minutes yourself, you lead some one else to waste five
minutes, and that makes ten. If a third follow your example, that
makes a quarter of an hour. Now, there are about a hundred and eighty
of us here; and if every one wasted five minutes in a day, what would
it come to? Let me see. Why, it would be fifteen hours; and fifteen
hours a day would be ninety hours--about eight days, working-time, in
a week; and in a year, would be four hundred days. Do you think we
could ever stand waste like that?" The poor loiterer is utterly
confounded. He had no idea of eating up fifteen hours, much less four
hundred days, of his good employer's time; and he never saw before how
fast five minutes could be multiplied.'

Mr Budgett was the son of a worthy couple, not exactly in poor, but in
rather difficult circumstances. He had little school education; but
his mother gave him a good religious training. From his earliest
intelligent years, he loved traffic. His first transaction was getting
a penny for a horse-shoe which he had found. Discovering that for a
half-penny he got six marbles, but for a penny fourteen, he bought
pennyworths and sold them in half-pennyworths to his companions, thus
realising a profit. Meeting an old woman with a basket of cucumbers,
he bought them, and by selling them again, realised ninepence. Truly
in his case the boy was father to the man. But, what was notable in
him, he would give away his accumulated profits all at once, in the
purchase of a hymn-book, or for the relief of some poor person. Even
then, it was not for sordid or selfish ends that he trafficked. In
these early years, his singular tact also came out. 'I remember,' he
said, 'about 1806 or 1807, a young man called on my mother, from Mr
D---- of Shepton, to solicit orders in the grocery trade. His