12mo. 180pp. With a half-title, an engraved frontispiece, an additional engraved title page, and coloured engraved general title for Darton's Juvenile Library (not called for by Darton). Original publisher's brown cloth, stamped in gilt and blind. Lightly rubbed and marked, joints starting, a trifle cocked. Without FFEP, spotting to frontispiece and engraved title page.

An early edition (printed in the year after the first) of influential children's writer Mary Martha Sherwood's (1775-1851) conduct of life tale in which a noble born Scotsman, and failed author ('...he began several poems, and two plays, and he wrote parts of several treatises on Mathematics, and Physics, and Natural History...but they were never finished'), resolves, upon inheriting his father's estate, to improve the arable grounds of his home with the use of a plough of his own design and manufacture, to which end he apprentices himself to a blacksmith.