Here the boy was made to strip, and the commissioner, Mr. Symonds, found a large cicatrix likely to have been occasioned by such an instrument, which must have passed through the glutei muscles, and have stopped only short of the hip-joint. There were twenty other wounds, occasioned by hurrying in low workings, upon and around the spinous processes of the vertebræ, from the sacrum upward. The boy continued— "He used to hit me with the belt, and mawl or sledge, and fling coals at me. He served me so bad that I left him, and went about to see if I could get a job. I used to sleep in the cabins upon the pit's bank, and in the old pits that had done working. I laid upon the shale all night. I used to get what I could to eat. I ate for a long time the candles that I found in the pits that the colliers left over night. I had nothing else to eat. I looked about for work, and begged of the people a bit. I got to Bradford after a while, and had a job there for a month while a collier's lad was poorly. When he came back, I was obliged to leave." Another case was related by Mr. Kennedy, one of the commissioners. A boy, named Edward Kershaw, had been apprenticed by the overseers of Castleton to a collier of the name of Robert Brierly, residing at Balsgate, who worked in a pit in the vicinity of Rooley Moor. The boy was examined, and from twenty-four to twenty-six wounds were found upon his body. His posteriors and loins were beaten to a jelly; his head, which was almost cleared of hair on the scalp, had the marks of many old wounds upon it which had healed up. One of the bones in one arm was broken below the elbow, and, from appearances, seemed to have been so for some time. The boy, on being brought before the magistrates, was unable either to sit or stand, and was placed on the floor of the office, laid on his side on a small cradle-bed. It appears from the evidence, that the boy's arm had been broken by a blow with an iron rail, and the fracture had never been set, and that he had been kept at work for several weeks with his arm in the condition above described. It further appeared in evidence, and was admitted by Brierly, that he had been in the habit of beating the boy with a flat piece of wood, in which a nail was driven and projected about half an inch. The blows had been inflicted with such violence that they penetrated the skin, and caused the wounds above mentioned. The body of the boy presented all the marks of emaciation. This brutal master had kept the boy at work as a wagoner until he was no longer of any use, and then sent him home in a cart to his mother, who was a poor widow, residing in Church lane, Rochdale. And yet it is said that a slave cannot breathe the air of England!