r; and very near to the
mansion-house of ---- Harrison, esquire. From this, he moved into the
city where he set up a public house well known to several persons now in
America, one of whom recollects to have seen young John figuring there
in capacity of waiter, or as it is commonly called in England, pot-boy.
His father dying, the widow married another husband--and John was put
out to an apprenticeship, in some inferior department of the silk trade.
Having, from his infancy, disclosed manifestations of that exquisite
voice and fine taste for music, which afterwards acquired him such fame
as a singer, he was put to sing with the boys in one of the churches of
Manchester, where he very soon distinguished himself not only for the
power and compass of one of the sweetest countertenor voices in the
world, but for a taste and accurate execution uncommon to his age and
untutored condition.

While the boy was drinking in, with rapture, the applause bestowed upon
his musical talents, his master earnestly deprecated, and violently
opposed the cultivation of them. In the contentions between this
applause and that opposition--between the charming flattery of the one,
and the mortifying severity of the other, the boy took that side which
it was natural for him to prefer; and genius, the parent of courage and
enterprise, suggested to him from time to time a variety of expedients
for baffling all his master's designs, and eluding his sharpest
vigilance. He collected around him a number of boys of about his own
age, who by a weekly subscription which they contrived to collect,
rented a cellar in an obscure retired alley--provided themselves with
musical instruments, and, with paper decorations and patchwork, formed a
little theatre, whither they resorted, every moment they could snatch by
stealth or pretext, from their parents' and masters' control, in order
privately to practise music and dancing, to spout and to perform (in
their way) plays, operas and farces. At this time the whole amount of
the schooling which the boy had received, barely enabled him to read a
chapter in the testament, to scrawl a very indifferent manuscript, and
to form an indistinct notion of the two or three first rules of vulgar
arithmetic. Such was the cunning and address with which these youngsters
_managed_ their theatre, that they enjoyed it several months without THE
OLD ONES being able to discover where they wasted their time. One answer
always served JOHN