e guardianship of his elder brother, his employments for some
years were threefold: 1st, taking care of and training race-horses; 2d,
taking care of gamecocks and preparing them for a match and main; 3d,
ploughing, harrowing, and other plantation work. At the age of seventeen
he undertook the business of a carpenter, under another brother, who
often had recourse to "hard words and severe blows," which he "did not
at all relish;" but he continued to labor in this way until about 1750.
During the five or six years while he lived with his brothers, he never
heard or saw anything of a religious nature, nor did he go to the parish
church once a year. The parish minister was a poor preacher, very
near-sighted, and, reading his sermons closely, he kept his eyes fixed
on the paper, and so near that what he said "seemed rather addressed to
the cushion than to the congregation." This parson was rarely observed
to stand erect and face the audience, except when he denounced some
individual in the congregation with whom he happened to have a quarrel.
Cards, dancing, racing, etc., were then the favorite pastimes, and young
Jarratt participated in them as far as his leisure and circumstances
would permit, and this as well on Sundays as on other days. Not being
content with his stock of learning, and skill in arithmetic being the
chief desideratum among the common people, he borrowed a book, and while
his plough-horse was grazing at noon applied himself to that study, and
made rapid progress. He felt conscious at this time that the plough and
the axe were not his element; and his skill in the division of crops, in
the rule of three, and in practice, soon became so widely known that he
was, unexpectedly, when at the age of nineteen, invited to set up a
school in Albemarle County, one hundred miles distant from New Kent. His
baggage appears to have constituted no considerable impediment to his
journey, for he says: "I think I carried the whole on my back except
one shirt." His entire wardrobe at this time consisted of a pair of
coarse breeches, one or two Oznaburg shirts, a pair of shoes and
stockings, an old felt hat, and a bear-skin coat, the first garment of
that kind that had ever been made for him. To improve the gentility of
his appearance he put on a cast-off wig, which he procured from a
servant. On setting out for Albemarle, young Jarratt had not a farthing
of money, and never had been master of as much as five shillings cash.
The