This on one occasion exasperated him so much that, seeing me support the lash without a tear and as if disdaining complaint, he franticly snatched up a pitch-fork, drove it at me, and, I luckily avoiding it, struck the prongs into the barn-door; with the exclamation, 'Damn your soul! I'll make you feel me!' The moment after he was seized with a sense of his own lunacy, turned as pale as death, and stood aghast with horror! My supposed crime was that I had eaten some milk, the last of which I myself had seen the dog lap. Perceiving the terror of his mind, I took courage and told him, 'Jowler eat the milk: I saw him, just as he had done. I would not tell you, because I knew if I had you would have hanged the poor dog.' This short sentence had such an effect upon him that he dropped on his knees, the tears rolling from his eyes, and cried out in an undescribable agony, 'Lord have mercy upon my sinful soul! I shall surely come to be hanged!' The terror of this lesson remained longer than those who knew him would have expected; but it insensibly wore away. The efforts I made in the interval to conciliate and avoid wakening the fiend were strenuous, but ineffectual. I shrunk from no labour, and the business with which he intrusted me shewed the confidence he placed in my activity and intelligence. At eleven years old I drove the loaded team, to market or elsewhere, without a superintendant. I was sent in every direction across the country, to bring home sheep, deliver calves to the butcher, fetch cattle, cart coals, or any thing else within my strength. Various were the distresses in which these duties, and the distempered choler of my master, involved me. On one occasion a wicked boy set his dog at my sheep, and drove them into a turnip field; out of which I could not get them but with great difficulty and loss of time, of which my master demanded a severe account. A calf once broke from me and foolishly tumbled into a water-pit, from which I delivered it at the hazard of my life. Another time, when the roads were heavy, my waggon was set fast in a clay rut, where I was detained above an hour; two drivers refusing to give me a pull because they had both lived with my malicious master; and a third being only prevailed on, for this master of mine was generally hated, by my prayers and tears and the picture I drew of my own distress. At length the violence of his temper recovered its full elasticity; which was a second time chiefly excited by my earnest longing after knowledge. Notwithstanding that my book was taken from me, my mind was often occupied with the arithmetic I had learned in better days, which had been strongly revived by its contents. At the employment this afforded me I was twice caught by my master; once multiplying and dividing with a nail against the paling, and the second time extracting the square root with chalk on the wall.