As for clothing, the badly patched suit he wore, which had originally been made for a full-sized man, was quite as much as he aspired to until “luck came his way,” and to have new garments was a dream he never allowed himself to indulge in, because of the apparent impossibility.
Now, while Ned presented every indication of a boy who has run away from home in order to better his fortunes, and wishes heartily that he could run back, he had never been so foolish, for the simple reason that so long as he could remember there was no home for him in all this wide world.
His first remembrance of anything even approaching an abiding-place was when he had reached his fifth birthday, and then understood he was supported by an uncle, who seldom lost an opportunity of telling him what a useless article he was, more especially on a farm.
After that he remembered a funeral, with his uncle in the coffin, and from the moment the hard-hearted farmer was carried to his last resting-place Ned’s journeyings began.
First one neighbor and then another had some work by which he could earn enough to pay for the small amount he ate, and finally, as he grew older, even these opportunities ceased.
He did not know that he had a single relative in the world to whom he could go, and while perfectly willing and even anxious to work, the townspeople called him a “lazy good-for-nothing, whose only desire was to eat the bread of idleness.”
“It’s mighty little of any kind of bread I get,” Ned once said to Deacon Grout, when the latter had made use of this remark because the boy applied to him for work. “I allers have done whatever I could find that would give me a square meal or a place to sleep; but it looks as if you folks wasn’t willin’ to spare that much. I s’pose you think a feller like me oughter pay for the privilege of stayin’ in this blamed old town.”
There is no question but that Ned’s provocation was great, yet it was an ill-advised remark, for from that day he not only had the reputation of being lazy, but impudent as well.
The deacon predicted he would “come to some bad end,” and the deacon’s friends fully expected each morning to hear that “the Rogers boy” had been sent to jail, because of having committed some terrible crime.
Despite this very unpleasant and unsatisfactory method of gaining less than half a livelihood, Ned remained in the town until he was fourteen years old; not for love of the place, but owing to his inability to leave.