orks which are usually talked
of here, put upon him nothing more than merely supervising his slaves
and taking care of them, when business obliged him to be absent.

One would have thought that so easy a state of life, after the toil and
miseries such a man as him of whom we are speaking must have run
through, would have been pleasing, and that it might have become a means
of reclaiming him from those vices so heinous in the sight of God, and
for which he had barely escaped the greatest punishment that can be
inflicted by man. At first, it indeed made some impressions not very
different from these; Barton owning that his master's treatment was such
that if a man had not absolutely bent his mind on such courses as
necessarily must make him unhappy, he might have enjoyed all he could
have hoped for there. Of which he became so sensible that for some time
he remained fully satisfied with his condition.

But alas! Content, when its basis rests not upon virtue, like a house
founded on a sandy soil is incapable of continuing long. No sooner had
Barton leisure and opportunity to recollect home, his friends, and above
all his wife, but it soon shocked his repose, and having awhile
disturbed and troubled him, it pushed him at last on the unhappy
resolution or returning to England, before the expiration of his time
for which he was banished. This project rolled for a very considerable
space in the fellow's head. Sometimes the desire of seeing his
companions, and above all things his wife, made him eager to undertake
it; at others, the fear of running upon inevitable death in case of a
discovery, and the consideration of the felicity he now had in his power
made him timorous, at least, if not unwilling to return.

At last, as is ordinary amongst these unhappy people, the worst opinion
prevailed, and finding a method to free himself from his master, and to
get aboard a ship, he came back to his dearly beloved London, and to
those measures which had already occasioned so great a misfortune, and
at last brought him to an ignominious death. On his return, his first
care was to seek out his wife, for whom he had a warm and never ceasing
affection, and having found her, he went to live with her, taking his
old methods of supporting them, though he constantly denied that she was
either a partner in the commission, or even so much as in the knowledge
of his guilt. But this quickly brought him to Newgate again, and to that
fatal end to w