do me good, it's a pity!

My father and mother both died when I was still a great awkward boy;
and I, being the only thing they had to bequeath, became the property
of a distant relation. I do not know how it happened, but I had no
near relations. I was a kind of waif upon the world from the
beginning; and I suppose it was owing to my having no family anchorage
that I acquired the habit of swaying to and fro, and drifting hither
and thither, at the pleasure of wind and tide. Not that my guardian
was inattentive or unkind--quite the reverse; but he was indolent and
careless, contenting himself with providing abundantly for my
schooling and my pocket, and leaving everything else to chance. He
would have done the same thing to his own son if he had had one, and
he did the same thing to his own daughter. But girls somehow cling
wherever they are cast--anything is an anchorage for them; and as
Laura grew up, she gave the care she had never found, and was the
little mother of the whole house. As for the titular mother, she had
not an atom of character of any kind. She might have been a picture,
or a vase, or anything else that is useless except to the taste or the
affections. But mamma was indispensable. It is a vulgar error to
suppose that people who have nothing in them are nobody in a house.
Our mamma was the very centre and point of our home feelings; and it
was strange to observe the devout care we took of a personage, who had
not two ideas in her head.

It is no wonder that I was always in a hurry, for I must have had an
instinctive idea that I had my fortune to look for. The governor had
nothing more than a genteel independence, and this would be a good
deal lessened after his death by the lapse of an annuity. But sister
Laura was thus provided for well enough, while I had not a shilling in
actual money, although plenty of hypothetical thousands and sundry
castles in the air. It was the consciousness of the latter kind of
property, no doubt, that gave me so free-and-easy an air, and made me
so completely the master of my own actions. How I did worry that
blessed old woman! how Laura lectured and scolded! how the governor
stormed! and how I was forgiven the next minute, and we were all as
happy again as the day was long! But at length the time of separation
came. I had grown a great hulking fellow, strong enough to make my
bread as a porter if that had been needed; and so a situation was
found for me in a counting-hou