A Strange Vow.
Not long since there died in a workhouse in Southwark a pedlar who used to sell odds-and-ends on a tray on London Bridge, and who pretended to be deaf and dumb. It is said that, though clothed in rags, he was a Swiss gentleman of means who, stung by remorse, had vowed not to open his lips for ten years, to go bareheaded and barefooted, and to abandon for twenty years all the advantages of his fortune. His vow was rigidly kept, and at the period of his death he was in the fourteenth year of his singular penance.