Page:The English Peasant.djvu/337

 houses—a farmhouse on the left hand, and two small houses on the right. In the first of these small houses on the right hand is the place where my mother brought me forth to see many an evil day. My father was a day-labouring man, who worked for seven or eight shillings in the winter, and in the summer for nine shillings a week, which is but a small pittance to keep a family. My mother bore eleven children, of which number I am the tenth. My parents being very poor, and receiving no support from the parish, we children fared very hard, and indeed seldom knew what it was to have a belly-full of victuals above once in the week, which was on the Sabbath day, when we were allowed to know what a bit of meat was. But it often happened that rent, or some other debt, was to be discharged, and on such accounts no meat could be procured. These barren Sabbaths were mourning days indeed to us young ones; but to our sorrow, they frequently came. Suffering with hunger, cold, and almost nakedness, so embittered my life in my childhood, that I often wished secretly that I had been a brute, for then I could have filled my belly in the fields."

In all his writings he is singularly careless of dates. However, we learn from the parish register at Cranbrook that he was born February 2nd, 1745.

To add to the wretched lot to which the poor child was called, a bar-sinister was on his birth. He was not the son of William Hunt, his reputed father, but of Barnabas Russel, the farmer for whom the ill-used man worked. Perhaps this was the reason that he was not baptized until he was nearly six years of age, but left a little outcast heathen in name as well as in fact.

Farmer Russel so far recognised his duty as to get him into the Free School. Here he learnt to write a little, and to read in the New Testament, but he was never taught to cast accounts.

He had previously learnt to read at a dame's school, and it was standing at her knee, or at that of her old man, that he says he first heard about God Almighty, as one who took note of children's sins. This idea, he says with a grim, unconscious humour, "stuck to my conscience a great while; and who this God Almighty could be I could not conjecture; and how He could know my sins without asking my mother I could not conceive.