After leaving the domains of my defunct uncle, said he, when the gate Closed between me and what was once to have been mine, I felt thrust out naked into the world, and completely abandoned to fortune.  What was to become of me?  I had been brought up to nothing but expectations, and they had all been disappointed.  I had no relations to look to for counsel or assistance.  The world seemed all to have died away from me.  Wave after wave of relationship had ebbed off, and I was left a mere hulk upon the strand.  I am not apt to be greatly cast down, but at this, time I felt sadly disheartened.  I could not realize my situation, nor form a conjecture how I was to get forward.

I was now to endeavor to make money.  The idea was new and strange to me.  It was like being asked to discover the philosopher’s stone.  I had never thought about money, other than to put my hand into my pocket and find it, or if there were none there, to wait until a new supply came from home.  I had considered life as a mere space of time to be filled up with enjoyments; but to have it portioned out into long hours and days of toil, merely that I might gain bread to give me strength to toil on; to labor but for the purpose of perpetuating a life of labor was new and appalling to me.  This may appear a very simple matter to some, but it will be understood by every unlucky wight in my predicament, who has had the misfortune of being born to great expectations.

I passed several days in rambling about the scenes of my boyhood; partly because I absolutely did not know what to do with myself, and partly because I did not know that I should ever see them again.  I clung to them as one clings to a wreck, though he knows he must eventually cast himself loose and swim for his life.  I sat down on a hill within sight of my paternal home, but I did not venture to approach it, for I felt compunction at the thoughtlessness with which I had dissipated my patrimony.  But was I to blame, when I had the rich possessions of my curmudgeon of an uncle in expectation?

The new possessor of the place was making great alterations.  The house was almost rebuilt.  The trees which stood about it were cut down; my mother’s flower-garden was thrown into a lawn; all was undergoing a change.  I turned my back upon it with a sigh, and rambled to another part of the country.

How thoughtful a little adversity makes one.  As I came in sight of the school-house where I had so often been flogged in the cause of wisdom, you would hardly have recognized the truant boy who but a few years since had eloped so heedlessly from its walls.  I leaned over the paling of the playground, and watched the scholars at their games, and looked to see if there might not be some urchin among them, like I was once, full of gay dreams about life and the world.  The play-ground seemed smaller than when I used to sport about it.  The house and park, too, of the neighboring squire, the father of the cruel Sacharissa, had shrunk in size and diminished in magnificence.  The distant hills no longer appeared so far off, and, alas! no longer awakened ideas of a fairy land beyond.