Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/512

470 470 PROVINCIAL BOOKSELLERS. otherwise, and he was placed in a silk-mill ; the youngest, and by far the smallest, of the 300 persons employed, a lofty pair of pattens were tied on to his feet so that he might be able to reach the engine; and he continues : " I had now to rise at five every morn- ing, summer and winter, for seven years ; to submit to the cane whenever convenient to the master ; to be the constant companion of the most rude and vulgar of the human race ; never taught by nature, nor ever wishing to be taught." Brutally treated, so that the scars of his chastisements remained on his body through life, he left the mill as soon as ever his apprenticeship expired ; " a place," he says, " most curious and pleasing to the eye," but which had given him a seven years' heart-ache. He was now bound for another term to an uncle a stocking-maker at Nottingham. " My task was to earn for my uncle 5^. Qd. a week. The first week I could reach this sum I was to be gratified with sixpence, but ever after, should I fall short or go beyond it, the loss or profit was to be my own." In this situation, he was not only thrashed by his master, but starved by his aunt ; and, goaded by the taunts of the neighbours, he fled away, but was reluctantly compelled to return. In 1744 his apprenticeship expired, and for two years longer he remained as a journeyman in the same employment, but he now made the melancholy dis- covery for all trade was in a very wretched condition at the time that he had served two separate terms of seven years, to two separate trades, and yet could subsist upon neither. A gradually acquired taste for reading led him to purchase a few books, and their tattered condition prompted him to try his hand at binding ; and, as he