Page:Life and Adventures of William Buckley.djvu/25

2 but a short time since I heard the former was still living at Middlewitch, also a town in Cheshire, and celebrated for its salt works.

The wandering, extraordinary life I have led, has naturally obliterated from my memory, many of the earlier scenes of my childhood; but few presenting themselves before me occasionally at this period, and those only as a dream. The following are however still vivid to my mind.

I remember, that from some circumstance or other, I was adopted by my mother's father, and that I was sent by him to an evening school, where I was taught to read; and that when about fifteen years of age, I was apprenticed by the same good old man to a Mr. Robert Wyatt, a Bricklayer, residing in that neighbourhood, to be taught the art and mystery of building houses for other people to live in—it being my fate, as will presently be seen, during thirty-two years, to inhabit dwellings of a very different description, having for their roofs only the wide spread of Heaven. Having been removed in the first instance from the immediate charge of my parents, I was, I suppose, not so strictly treated by the old people as I should have been, as a boy, and hence the restraints imposed upon me by my master, and his very proper endeavours to make me useful and industrious, were considered hardships and punishments, unnecessarily and improperly inflicted. This feeling, in time, completely unsettled me, and my uncontrolled discontent mastering my boyish reason, when I was about