ssions
of these young brutes are heart-sickening to call to recollection. I
have been called out of my bed, and _waked for the purpose_, in the
coldest winter nights--and this not once, but night after night--in my
shirt, to receive the discipline of a leathern thong, with eleven
other sufferers, because it pleased my callow overseer, when there has
been any talking heard after we were gone to bed, to make the six last
beds in the dormitory, where the youngest children of us slept,
answerable for an offence they neither dared to commit, nor had the
power to hinder.--The same execrable tyranny drove the younger part of
us from the fires, when our feet were perishing with snow; and under
the cruellest penalties, forbade the indulgence of a drink of water,
when we lay in sleepless summer nights, fevered with the season, and
the day's sports.

There was one H----,[7] who, I learned, in after days, was seen
expiating some maturer offence in the hulks. (Do I flatter myself in
fancying that this might be the planter of that name, who suffered--at
Nevis, I think, or St. Kitts,--some few years since? My friend Tobin
was the benevolent instrument of bringing him to the gallows.) This
petty Nero actually branded a boy, who had offended him, with a
red-hot iron; and nearly starved forty of us, with exacting
contributions, to the one half of our bread, to pamper a young ass,
which, incredible as it may seem, with the connivance of the nurse's
daughter (a young flame of his) he had contrived to smuggle in, and
keep upon the leads of the _ward_, as they called our dormitories.
This game went on for better than a week, till the foolish beast, not
able to fare well but he must cry roast meat--happier than Caligula's
minion, could he have kept his own counsel--but, foolisher, alas! than
any of his species in the fables--waxing fat, and kicking, in the
fulness of bread, one unlucky minute would needs proclaim his good
fortune to the world below; and, laying out his simple throat, blew
such a ram's horn blast, as (toppling down the walls of his own
Jericho) set concealment any longer at defiance. The client was
dismissed, with certain attentions, to Smithfield; but I never
understood that the patron underwent any censure on the occasion. This
was in the stewardship of L.'s admired Perry.

[Footnote 7: Hodges.]

Under the same _facile_ administration, can L. have forgotten the cool
impunity with which the nurses used to carry away openl