Note 4 — Chapter I · THE WIDOWED AND THE FATHERLESS.

“Mrs. Davy was the third and youngest daughter of Grace and Humphry Millett.... Mr. Millett was engaged in business in the town of Penzance as a mercer. He and his wife died young, and in the same week—he on the 3d of June, 1757, and she on the 9th.... Mr. John Tonkin was their friend, and supplied the place of a father to them (the orphan children), and they retained through life a most grateful sense of his kindness, and of the great obligations they owed to him. At the time of the death of Mr. and Mrs. Millett, he (Mr. Tonkin) was residing in their house (I suppose in lodgings), and there he continued to reside for some years, the children being under the care of a Miss Peggy Adams, their cousin, in whose name the mercer’s business was continued, by the profits of which the family was chiefly supported.”—Dr. John Davy, p. 7, vol. i.

Dr. Paris, in his life of Sir Humphry Davy (p. 2), says, speaking of the philosopher’s mother, “Her maiden name was Grace Millett, and she was remarkable for the placidity of her temper and the amiable and benevolent tendency of her disposition. She had been adopted and brought up with her two sisters, under circumstances of affecting interest, by Mr. John Tonkin.... To withhold a narrative of the circumstances which led Mr. Tonkin to the adoption of these orphan children would be to deprive the world of one of those bright examples of pure and disinterested benevolence which cheer the heart and ornament our nature.... The parents of these children having been attacked by a fatal fever expired within a few hours of each other. The dying agonies of the surviving mother were sharpened by her reflecting on the forlorn condition in which her children would be left. For, although the Milletts were originally aristocratic and wealthy, the property had undergone so many sub-divisions as to have left but a very slender provision for the member of the family to whom she had united herself.” On the decease of Mrs. Millett (Dr. Paris tells us), Mr. Tonkin immediately took charge of her three orphan daughters, and “continued their kind benefactor until each in succession found a home by marriage.”