in the
city of Oxford, who were careful in giving him a suitable education,
which he, through the wickedness of his future life, utterly forgot,
insomuch that he knew scarce the Creed and the Lord's Prayer, at the
time he had most need of them. When he grew a tolerable big lad his
friends put him out as apprentice to a butcher, where having served a
great part of his time, he fell in love, as they call it, with a young
country lass hard by, and Dick's passion growing outrageous, he attacked
the poor maid with all the amorous strains of gallantry he was able. The
hearts of young uneducated wenches, like unfortified towns, make little
resistance when once beseiged, and therefore Shepherd had no great
difficulty in making a conquest. However the girl insisted on honourable
terms, and unfortunately for the poor fellow they were married before
his time was out; an error in conduct, which in low life is seldom
retrieved.

It happened so here. Shepherd's master was not long before he discovered
this wedding. He thereupon gave the poor fellow so much trouble that he
was at last forced to give him forty shillings down, and a bond for
twenty-eight pounds more. This having totally ruined him, Dick unhappily
fell into the way of dishonest company, who soon drew him into their
ways of gaining money and supplying his necessities at the hazard both
of his conscience and his neck; in which, though he became an expert
proficient, yet could he never acquire anything considerable thereby,
but was continually embroiled in debt. His wife bringing every year a
child, contributed not a little thereto. However, Dick rubbed on mostly
by thieving and as little by working as it was possible to avoid.

When he first began his robberies, he went housebreaking, and actually
committed several facts in the city of Oxford itself. But those things
not being so easily to be concealed there as at London, report quickly
began to grow very loud about him, and Dick was forced to make shift
with pilfering in other places; in which he was (to use the manner of
speaking of those people) so unlucky that the second or third fact he
committed in Hertfordshire, he was detected, seized, and at the next
assizes capitally convicted. Yet out of compassion to his youth, and in
hopes he might be sufficiently checked by so narrow an escape from the
gallows, his friends procured him first a reprieve and then a pardon.

But this proximity to death made little impression