My ambitious parent, infatuated with the admiration and assiduity of her numerous suitors, despised them all, and falling a victim to her vanity, suffered herself to be seduced from the paths of propriety by a designing young pointer, who threw himself in her way, and employed every artifice, until at length he induced her to elope with him from her master’s comfortable farm-yard. For a while the guilty pair contrived to escape detection. My unhappy mother took up her abode under a hay-stack in the neighbourhood, and for a week or two was well and kindly treated by her gay and youthful lover, who regularly saved a portion of his daily meals for her use. After a little, however, meeting with a new and more beautiful object on whom to bestow his worthless affections, he abandoned my mother to her own resources, and from that period she saw him no more. Dreading to return to the home she had left, and being pressed with hunger, she was compelled to steal for her subsistence, and the poultry in the neighbouring homesteads visibly diminished in number; while, to crown all, my parent was brought to the straw, and became the mother of five little ones, including myself. The additional drag which the suckling of so large a family produced, increased my progenitor’s rapacity four-fold, and the indulgence of it caused her destruction. One day as she lay beside us, half famished, and ready almost to devour her own offspring, a little pig chanced to pass by. My mother belonged to a fierce breed, that called the bull-terrier, and, accordingly, stimulated by the gnawings of hunger, she sprang upon the little pig, and had well nigh silenced it for ever, when its loud squeals brought one of the farm-servants to the spot. We were discovered, the unlucky pig rescued, my mother hanged to a post in the barn, and we--thrown into the horsepond. My brothers and sisters all perished; but I, who was rather stronger than the rest, contrived to struggle to the bank, and was found there some short time afterwards by a young man belonging to the establishment, who carried me home with the intention of rearing me.