over and over: nobody did care for him, and he was as sure to turn up
as a bad guinea. He has been cried like _Found_ Goods in Belford Market:
advertised like a strayed donkey in the _H----shire Courant_; put for
safe keeping into compters, cages, roundhouses, and bridewells: passed,
by different constables, through half the parishes in the county; and
so frequently and minutely described in handbills and the _Hue and Cry_,
that by the time he was twelve years old, his stature, features, and
complexion were as well known to the rural police as those of some great
state criminal. In a word, "the lad _would_ live;" and the Aberleigh
overseers, who would doubtless have been far from inconsolable if they
had never happened to hear of him again, were reluctantly obliged to
make the best of their bargain.

Accordingly, they placed him as a sort of boy of all-work at "the shop"
at Hinton, where he remained, upon an accurate computation, somewhere
about seven hours; they then put him with a butcher at Langley, where he
staid about five hours and a-half, arriving at dusk, and escaping before
midnight: then with a baker at Belford, in which good town he sojourned
the (for him) unusual space of two nights and a day; and then they
apprenticed him to Master Samuel Goddard, an eminent dealer in cattle
leaving his new master to punish him according to law, provided
he should run away again. Run away of course he did; but as he had
contrived to earn for himself a comfortably bad character for stupidity
and laziness, and as he timed his evasion well--during the interval
between the sale of a bargain of Devonshire stots, and the purchase of
a lot of Scotch kyloes, when his services were little needed--and as
Master Samuel Goddard had too much to do and to think of, to waste his
time and his trouble on a search after a heavy-looking under-drover,
with a considerable reputation for laziness, Jesse, for the first
time in his life, escaped his ordinary penalties of pursuit and
discovery--the parish officers contenting themselves by notifying to
Master Samuel Goddard, that they considered their responsibility, legal
as well as moral, completely transferred to him in virtue of their
indentures, and that whatever might be the future destiny of his unlucky
apprentice, whether frozen or famished, hanged or drowned, the blame
would rest with the cattle-dealer aforesaid, to whom they resolved to
refer all claims on their protection, whether advanced