He

not come and sit with me; but the brute would give me no answer. was the parish apothecary, one Freeman, whom my uncle had called in to me; and was entirely under his influence, as being a rich man and one of the overseers. How many a bright sunny afternoon have I heard this fellow and my uncle, as they sate in the room underneath me carousing over their cups, singing greasy songs and mimicking the voice of my mother.

My uncle had never once been near me, since I was brought to his house, but he could not resist the temptation of coming himself to tell me the news of old Sarah's death. "Well, you young vagabond," he called out, as he entered the room, "there's another of your friends gone now." I was not, at that moment, thinking of poor Sarah, and I did not catch his meaning. "O, you need not stare so," he continued, "it's your old servant, I mean: she died last night, just in time to escape being sent to the work-house." A thrill, like the edge of a knife, shot through me at his words. My heart seemed suddenly stopped in its beating, like the swinging of a clock's pendulum; for I felt that I had lost in her the last being upon earth that loved or cared for me, or for whom I had any love or care. But pride and hatred were now beginning to lift up their heads within my bosom, like serpents on a spring day, and I was resolved he should not have the satisfaction of seeing how miserable he had made me. So I looked at him, with a sullen eye, and only said, "Well, how can I help it?" He gazed at me with astonishment, for a moment, and then pursing up his purply lips into a whistle, like a pig's mouth, he walked out of the room, without another word. I waited till he got to the bottom of the stairs, and then, giving way abandonedly to a gush of tears, I pressed my face flat on the pillow, and wept till it was as wet as a wrung towel.

It has always appeared to me that I may date, from that day, the hardening and fixing within me of a new and evil nature. If the clements of any qualities, innately bad of themselves, had hitherto existed in me, they were but as floating humours, that might, under happier circumstances, have passed away altogether without coming to a head, doing no injury; but from that time forth they balled themselves together, and struck their fibres through my whole frame, cancerous and ineradicable. My mother's death had taken me by surprise, like a sudden blow from behind that prostrates a man on his face at once, giving him no time for resistance or remonstrance. The precipitate letting of the Grange, and the cruel unnecessary selling of the smallest articles that had belonged to her and my father, I did not know until some time after they had taken place, and the having me wheeled to his house in a barrow had made far less impression upon me, as regarded myself, than the sight of poor Sarah

wretched and crying by the side of it. But the treatment which I had experienced, for some weeks past, had been gradually changing my disposition-curdling and turning sour within me the milk of human kindness. I had, when I first came to my uncle's house, been carried up to a large desolate-looking chamber, with no furniture in it but a flock bedthat stood upon the ground in one corner, with an old sack spread over it by way of coverlet; a deal table, spotted with ink and stinking with slopped beer; and two or thee rush-bottomed half-green chairs; while the broken window-panes, more numerous than the whole ones, were some of them stuffed with wisps of straw, and others covered with oiled paper. My victuals when I asked for any, and none were brought me till I did ask -consisted of pieces of stale bread, with the crust cut off, and the juiceless sodden meat-scraps, that had come out of the servants' broth, and would, doubtless, have been emptied into the hog-trough, or given to the yard dog, if I had not been there to eat them. Not a soul came near me but the flat-eyed rascally apothecary, with his pock-pitted cribbage-board of a countenance, and a sullen old farming-man, of the name of Robin, who brought me my meals and did what was absolutely necessary in the chamber, grumbling all the while at his trouble. My uncle I never saw, save upon the occasion which I have just mentioned; but I could hear him, at all hours when he was in the house, cursing and swearing at some one or other if he was sober, and singing and shouting like a madman if he was drunk. I had used to lie a-bed all day, tossing about and thinking what a terrible change had befallen me. Sometimes I would work myself up into a paroxysm of passion, and call out "O, that I had a gun or pistol that I might go down stairs and shoot my uncle!" and then I would picture him, to myself, lying upon the ground, bleeding from a great wound which I had given him, writhing and groaning and shaking his fist at me. And once or twice, when I heard him roaring over his bottle, of an afternoon, I would shout out, at the top of my voice, and drown his, till he would leave off with a curse upon me. But all these bad and bitter feelings, would, in all probability, have passed away, if I had been removed, ere that day, from my uncle's house, and fallen into kind hands; and I should, most likely, soon have forgotten them altogether, or looked back upon what I then suffered as a distant dream of my childhood, or faint embarrassing recollection of some former state of being. For my temper, I repeat, was originally not a bad one. A word, a look even, from my mother, would rule me like a witch's wand. With her to love and talk to, and next to her, old Sarah, and one of my father's books or my fishing-rod to amuse me, I had been at once one of the happiest and most easily-ruled children in creation. If I had any melancholy moments they were those I spent in the churchyard with my

mother; and those, though sorrowful, were not unhappy ones. How many a long happy morning have I spent, in those days, sitting on the bank of the mill-pool, my fishing-rod beside me, with my line out at full stretch, drawn down by the current, my attention fixed on some learned old volume, such as had, probably, never before occupied a boy of my years; or letting my mind roam, at random, conjuring up bright foolish fancies. Sometimes I would imagine myself a great writer—a Sir Thomas Browne or a Doctor Swift-that had just put forth a work full of paradox and learning, delighting at once and puzzling the world to know if I were in jest or earnest. Sometimes I was a king, at the head of a mighty army, invading neighbouring states, fighting obstinate battles, but in which I always, eventually, gained the victory, and dying at length on a heap of enemies, leaving an immortal name behind me, like the two great kings of Sweden. And then I would suppose myself to be gifted with invisibility-like Gyges' ring, that we read about in Herodotus; or the power to be transported where I pleased, into goldsmiths' strong-rooms or statesmen's council-chambers like King Erick or Fortunatus and laugh aloud with pleasure at the consternation my appearance created. And once when my mother, some two years before her death, had purchased for me, at a book-stall, at Northampton, a "Life of Raymond Lully," the alchymist, that filled King Richard's treasury with gold, I could think, for several days afterwards, of nothing but the philosopher's stone and the wonders to be wrought by it. I teased her to procure me a crucible and ryllus ;* and as we could find no such things in the village, nor did either of us, to say the truth, know exactly how to describe them so as to set the blacksmith upon making them, we took an old frying-pan, put a quantity of pieces of different metals into it, with sulphur and vitriol for agents, and set about gold-making, with an ardour worthy of being celebrated in a fourth book of Augurellus. But those days of happiness

and dreaming were now for ever at an end. My mind and whole disposition, like a stream that had long remained motionless and undecided, as it

* A sort of funnel, used by the Alchymists. It is included in Kircher's list, at the end of the eleventh book of the "De Mundo Subterraneo."-Editor.

† John Aurelius Augurellus, a celebrated poet and chemist, of the sixteenth century. He was the author of a poem, in three books, "De Chrysopoeiâ," dedicated to Leo the Tenth, who presented him, in return, as the story gocs, with an empty purse, sagaciously observing "that a man who knew how to make gold needed nothing but a purse to put it into." The Chrysopoeia was once held in considerable estimation as a poem; but Scaliger, the universal depreciator, allows it but very little merit, "Elaboratior ipsius Chrysopoeia, cæterùm vix adeo spirat; ita languida omnia ac pænè emortua; trepidationis potius quam limæ agnoscas vestigia."-Poetices, lib. 6, cap. iv., p. 303.— Editor.

were, which way to run, seemed all at once, by a sudden impulse, to be turned into a particular channel, in which it could never afterwards stop itself or be diverted from it. What at bowls they call the bias, the accidentally-given direction that decides most men's characters, that have any, and their careers in life, now befell me; and unluckily it was a bad one. As the greatest of living writers is reported to say, of himself, that his moody misanthropical temperament, that temperament which hath lately given birth to those most beastly true Yahoos, grew out of a disappointment which he experienced, when quite a child, in losing a large fish that he had drawn up to the top of the water and that then suddenly dropped in again, so did the tidings of old Sarah's death, thus brutally communicated to me, and the feeling of being alone in the world with only bitterness of soul for a passion, give a twist and wrench to mine (to compare small things with great), making me what I am :—

"Mansit et illuc

Quod mutare queat; quod flectere nulla potestas."

CHAPTER III.

When my crying fit was over, and it lasted fully half-an-hour, I sate up in my bed, dried my eyes with the corner of the sack, and fell a thinking. My mind, at first, flew back, notwithstanding all my efforts to prevent it, to the Grange; and the figure of my mother would rise up continually, and stand before me, smiling and affectionate, as she looked the night before she died. But I drove the beloved image from me, as well as I could, and set resolutely to the asking of myself what course I had best adopt, under the circumstances in which I was placed. And then the thought darted through my mind, like a sunbeam into a dark room, on the opening of the shutters, that if I were to kill myself and die, I should be buried in the churchyard beside her and my father, and rejoin them in another state and be happy. Perhaps this notion occurred the more readily to me, as the meeting and recognizing of our dead friends and relations in heaven had been a favourite topic with my mother. Rarely, indeed, had we walked home from church, of a Sunday, but she would ask me if I did not think that this was a very reasonable belief, and whether there was anything in the books which I had read that forbade or discouraged our entertaining it. Had there been a phial of laudanum at hand, as one sometimes stumbles upon in cupboards, or an old sword, hanging up by the wall, on which I could have fallen, I have very little doubt but that I should have put an end to my existence on the spot. The only wonder to me is that I did not jump out of the

window, or strangle myself with the cords of the sacking. But my head was full of ancient suicides: the bowl of hemlock, the sword, the opened flowing veins of the dying Philosopher, surrounded by a crowd of weeping admiring friends-reasoning with and consoling them to the last"Je vais etre semblable à Dieu;

Je vais etre immortel; amis, adieu!"

and other means of effecting it really did not suggest themselves to me. And perchance I should have neglected them, if they had-in the sort of mind I was then of, and very Pagan admiration of antiquity-as modern degrading ways of sneaking out of existence.*

Then I began to enquire of myself whether I had any friends or connections that would receive me into their houses; or, at least, insist, if I stayed at my uncle's, on my being very differently treated: but I could think of none. Our distant kinsman, at H―, the same that had got my father's colours upwards of forty years before, was still living: but him I had never seen, nor he assuredly ever heard of me; and my mother thought but ill of him—for though she had written to him at my father's death to make him acquainted with it, he had not even acknowledged her letter.

Six months before I should have found a warm friend and protector in old Mr. Staunton, the Vicar of M-: a kind, learned, merry old man, with a white head and red face, that would come up, almost daily, to the Grange, and read some old book, sometimes one that he had brought, sometimes one of my father's, and rub his hands with pleasure, and tell my mother, still more to hers, that I was a wonderful scholar for my years, and should grow up a very learned man-a Wasse, or perhaps a Bentley. But he too, like all that I had loved, had gone the common road; and the church-duty had been performed, since his decease, first by one parson, then by another, just as Jno. Darker, the parish-clerk, could find one willing to undertake it, till a new Incumbent was appointed.

In the village itself there was no one I could appeal to. My uncle owned a great part of the land in the parish; and the rest of it, save what little belonged to the Grange, was the property of Squire Sanderson, a grandson of the great Bishop, who lived upon another of his estates in a distant part of the country. The other inhabitants of the place were, besides

"Exitum ferum et inhonestum," says Tacitus of Tigellinus, that cut his throat

with a penknife; and of Judas, the accurst apostate

"He whom the Jews debauch'd with paltry bribe,

Amounting just to half-a-crown a tribe-"

the Rabbis say that he penitently selected the dishonourable death of hanging, as a fit retributory ending for his villanous existence."-J. W.