illed. The voice of Nature must at last be heard in my favour,
surely. It will only plead at first to my friends in the still conscious
plaintiveness of a young and unhardened beggar. But it will grow more
clamorous when I have the courage to be so, and shall demand, perhaps,
the paternal protection from farther ruin; and that forgiveness, which
those will be little entitled to expect, for their own faults, who shall
interpose to have it refused to me, for an accidental, not a premeditated
error: and which, but for them, I had never fallen into.

But again, impatiency, founded perhaps on self-partiality, that strange
misleader! prevails.

Let me briefly say, that it is necessary to my present and future hopes
that you keep well with my family. And moreover, should you come, I may
be traced out by that means by the most abandoned of men. Say not then
that you think you ought to come up to me, let it be taken as it will:--
For my sake, let me repeat, (were my foster-brother recovered, as I hope
he is,) you must not come. Nor can I want your advice, while I can
write, and you can answer me. And write I will as often as I stand in
need of your counsel.

Then the people I am now with seem to be both honest and humane: and
there is in the same house a widow-lodger, of low fortunes, but of great
merit:--almost such another serious and good woman as the dear one to
whom I am now writing; who has, as she says, given over all other
thoughts of the world but such as should assist her to leave it happily.
--How suitable to my own views!--There seems to be a comfortable
providence in this at least--so that at present there is nothing of
exigence; nothing that can require, or even excuse, your coming, when so
many better ends may be answered by your staying where you are. A time
may come, when I shall want your last and best assistance: and then, my
dear Mrs. Norton--and then, I will speak it, and embrace it with all my
whole heart--and then, will it not be denied me by any body.

You are very obliging in your offer of money. But although I was forced
to leave my clothes behind me, yet I took several things of value with
me, which will keep me from present want. You'll say, I have made a
miserable hand of it--so indeed I have--and, to look backwards, in a very
little while too.

But what shall I do, if my father cannot be prevailed upon to recall his
malediction? O my dear Mrs. Norton, what a weight must a father's cur