ot look for the consolations of friendship; but,
instead of seeking to identify myself with the joys and sorrows of
others, and exchanging the delicious gifts of confidence and sympathy,
was compelled to centre my thoughts and my vigilance in myself. My life
was all a lie. I had a counterfeit character to support. I had
counterfeit manners to assume. My gait, my gestures, my accents, were
all of them to be studied. I was not free to indulge, no not one, honest
sally of the soul. Attended with these disadvantages, I was to procure
myself a subsistence, a subsistence to be acquired with infinite
precautions, and to be consumed without the hope of enjoyment.

This, even this, I was determined to endure; to put my shoulder to the
burthen, and support it with unshrinking firmness. Let it not however be
supposed that I endured it without repining and abhorrence. My time was
divided between the terrors of an animal that skulks from its pursuers,
the obstinacy of unshrinking firmness, and that elastic revulsion that
from time to time seems to shrivel the very hearts of the miserable. If
at some moments I fiercely defied all the rigours of my fate, at others,
and those of frequent recurrence, I sunk into helpless despondence. I
looked forward without hope through the series of my existence, tears of
anguish rushed from my eyes, my courage became extinct, and I cursed the
conscious life that was reproduced with every returning day.

"Why," upon such occasions I was accustomed to exclaim, "why am I
overwhelmed with the load of existence? Why are all these engines at
work to torment me? I am no murderer; yet, if I were, what worse could I
be fated to suffer? How vile, squalid, and disgraceful is the state to
which I am condemned! This is not my place in the roll of existence, the
place for which either my temper or my understanding has prepared me! To
what purpose serve the restless aspirations of my soul, but to make me,
like a frighted bird, beat myself in vain against the enclosure of my
cage? Nature, barbarous nature! to me thou hast proved indeed the worst
of step-mothers; endowed me with wishes insatiate, and sunk me in
never-ending degradation!"

I might have thought myself more secure if I had been in possession of
money upon which to subsist. The necessity of earning for myself the
means of existence, evidently tended to thwart the plan of secrecy to
which I was condemned. Whatever labour I adopted, or deemed myself
qual