me.  I do not know to what feeling or happy accident I owed my rescue from this first neglect; as a child I was ignorant of it, as a man I have not discovered it.  Far from easing my lot, my brother and my two sisters found amusement in making me suffer.  The compact in virtue of which children hide each other’s peccadilloes, and which early teaches them the principles of honor, was null and void in my case; more than that, I was often punished for my brother’s faults, without being allowed to prove the injustice.  The fawning spirit which seems instinctive in children taught my brother and sisters to join in the persecutions to which I was subjected, and thus keep in the good graces of a mother whom they feared as much as I. Was this partly the effect of a childish love of imitation; was it from a need of testing their powers; or was it simply through lack of pity?  Perhaps these causes united to deprive me of the sweets of fraternal intercourse.

Disinherited of all affection, I could love nothing; yet nature had made me loving.  Is there an angel who garners the sighs of feeling hearts rebuffed incessantly?  If in many such hearts the crushed feelings turn to hatred, in mine they condensed and hollowed a depth from which, in after years, they gushed forth upon my life.  In many characters the habit of trembling relaxes the fibres and begets fear, and fear ends in submission; hence, a weakness which emasculates a man, and makes him more or less a slave.  But in my case these perpetual tortures led to the development of a certain strength, which increased through exercise and predisposed my spirit to the habit of moral resistance.  Always in expectation of some new grief—­as the martyrs expected some fresh blow—­my whole being expressed, I doubt not, a sullen resignation which smothered the grace and gaiety of childhood, and gave me an appearance of idiocy which seemed to justify my mother’s threatening prophecies.  The certainty of injustice prematurely roused my pride—­that fruit of reason—­and thus, no doubt, checked the evil tendencies which an education like mine encouraged.

Though my mother neglected me I was sometimes the object of her solicitude; she occasionally spoke of my education and seemed desirous of attending to it herself.  Cold chills ran through me at such times when I thought of the torture a daily intercourse with her would inflict upon me.  I blessed the neglect in which I lived, and rejoiced that I could stay alone in the garden and play with the pebbles and watch the insects and gaze into the blueness of the sky.  Though my loneliness naturally led me to reverie, my liking for contemplation was first aroused by an incident which will give you an idea of my early troubles.  So little notice was taken of me that the governess occasionally forgot to send me to bed.  One evening I was peacefully crouching under a fig-tree, watching a star with that passion of curiosity which takes possession of a child’s mind, and to which my