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