He managed to reach home, and they naturally were greatly alarmed at his condition. My friend was called up, and sent to Beccles for the doctor. He had to go past where the murderous attack had been committed, the ground being still moist with blood. Coming to the place, he told me, he came upon his master’s hat, and having placed it over into Worlingham Park till his return, went forward again unmolested. Arriving at the town, by Fair Close, when near the Prison, there was a gate and a style, he said he knelt down, and prayed that the Lord would be merciful to his master, and heal him, and spare him a little longer. This was, perhaps, the first prayer offered in Beccles on that Sunday morning—it was past midnight. When his poor injured master arrived at his home that prayer was heard and answered, for by assiduous and skilful treatment, poor William Pidgeon’s life was preserved some twenty years longer. A reward £100 was offered by the Government, upon proof of the offence being established against the perpetrator, but it was not discovered until the poor conscience stricken miserable wretch confessed to it upon his dying bed. This was the outcome of the burden of a guilty conscience. During all my servitude hitherto I had but a small amount of pocket money; but in my last year, 1829, after earning a certain sum for master weekly, I was allowed the surplus, and, another coming in to take some of the out-door turns, I could sit and work at the trade more closely, and with more energy, and this also proved an advantage to the master, as well as to myself: thus our interests were to a certain extent mutual, although when a mistake happened, as it sometimes did, then it would assuredly be religion that was most ridiculed, of the which poor master could not discover there was any necessity, although admonished by repeated warnings that our days are as a vapour which soon vanisheth away. I was now becoming more and more acquainted with the trade of country boot-making, and was considered, as an apprentice, a very decent hand, considering I was learning in a village. I liked my trade tolerably well, and was, perhaps, on the whole, fairly obliging, amongst the wax, the thread, the leather, and the nails, and all other concomitants incident to a boot-making establishment, to which I had, by this time, become almost naturalised, and felt quite at home as a few extra pence came into my pocket, for although I had permission to go to Beccles to fairs and races, and such like amusements, yet I did not often prefer to accept those seeming favours—those gilded baubles, which perish with the using. My friend would say, “Let us go for our cows an hour sooner, then we can kneel down and pray for the giddy, noisy multitude,” many of whom were slaves to sin and Satan, fast bound in the snare, from which nothing short of a divine power can extricate—