petticoat--a moment, by the way, in which the
obstinate and masterful spirit of the ungentle sex often begins to
show itself in nurseries of a far more polished description;--from that
moment may Jesse's wanderings be said to commence. Disobedience lurked
in the habit masculine. The wilful urchin stood, like some dandy
apprentice, contemplating his brown sturdy legs, as they stuck out from
his new trowsers, already (such was the economy of the tailor employed
on the occasion) "a world too _short_," and the first use he made of
those useful supporters was to run away. So little did any one really
care for the poor child, that not being missed till night-fall, or
sought after till the next morning, he had strayed far enough, when, at
last picked up, and identified by the parish mark on his new jacket, to
be half frozen, (it was mid-winter when his first elopement happened,)
half-starved, half-drowned, and more than half-dead of fatigue and
exhaustion. "It will be a lesson!" said the moralising matron of the
workhouse, as, after a sound scolding, she fed the little culprit and
put him to bed. "It will be a lesson to the rover!" And so it proved;
for, after being recruited by a few days' nursing, he again ran away, in
a different direction.

When recovered the second time, he was whipped as well as fed--another
lesson which only made the stubborn recusant run the faster. Then, upon
his next return, they shut him up in a dark den appropriately called the
black-hole, a restraint which, of course, increased his zest for light
and liberty, and in the first moment of freedom--a moment greatly
accelerated by his own strenuous efforts in the shape of squalling,
bawling, roaring, and stamping, unparalleled and insupportable, even in
that mansion of din--in the very instant of freedom he was off again; he
ran away from work; he ran away from school; certain to be immersed in
his dismal dungeon as soon as he could be recaught; so that his whole
childhood became a series of alternate imprisonments and escapes.

That he should be so often lost was, considering his propensities and
the proverbial cunning of his caste, not, perhaps, very remarkable. But
the number of times and the variety of ways, in which, in spite of the
little trouble taken in searching for him, he was sent back to the place
from whence he came, was really something wonderful. If any creature in
the world had cared a straw for the poor child, he must have been lost