would read about being “stayed with flagons and comforted with apples, for he was sick of love.”  Sometimes he would hobble, with spectacle on nose, through whole chapters of hard Hebrew names in Deuteronomy; at which the poor woman would sigh and groan as if wonderfully moved.  His favorite book, however, was “The Pilgrim’s Progress;” and when he came to that part which treats of Doubting Castle and Giant Despair, I thought invariably of him and his desolate old country seat.  So much did the idea amuse me, that I took to scribbling about it under the trees in the park; and in a few days had made some progress in a poem, in which I had given a description of the place, under the name of Doubting Castle, and personified my uncle as Giant Despair.

I lost my poem somewhere about the house, and I soon suspected that my uncle had found it; as he harshly intimated to me that I could return home, and that I need not come and see him again until he should send for me.

Just about this time my mother died.—­I cannot dwell upon this circumstance; my heart, careless and wayworn as it is, gushes with the recollection.  Her death was an event that perhaps gave a turn to all my after fortunes.  With her died all that made home attractive, for my father was harsh, as I have before said, and had never treated me with kindness.  Not that he exerted any unusual severity towards me, but it was his way.  I do not complain of him.  In fact, I have never been of a complaining disposition.  I seem born to be buffeted by friends and fortune, and nature has made me a careless endurer of buffetings.

I now, however, began to grow very impatient of remaining at school, to be flogged for things that I did not like.  I longed for variety, especially now that I had not my uncle’s to resort to, by way of diversifying the dullness of school with the dreariness of his country seat.  I was now turned of sixteen; tall for my age, and full of idle fancies.  I had a roving, inextinguishable desire to see different kinds of life, and different orders of society; and this vagrant humor had been fostered in me by Tom Dribble, the prime wag and great genius of the school, who had all the rambling propensities of a poet.

I used to set at my desk in the school, on a fine summer’s day, and instead of studying the book which lay open before me, my eye was gazing through the window on the green fields and blue hills.  How I envied the happy groups seated on the tops of stage-coaches, chatting, and joking, and laughing, as they were whirled by the school-house, on their way to the metropolis.  Even the wagoners trudging along beside their ponderous teams, and traversing the kingdom, from one end to the other, were objects of envy to me.  I fancied to myself what adventures they must experience, and what odd scenes of life they must witness.  All this was doubtless the poetical temperament working within me, and tempting me forth into a world of its own creation, which I mistook for the world of real life.