was smoothed
out at last!

"While I was living thus on the offal of literature, I met with a woman
of good birth, and fair fortune, whose sympathies or whose curiosity
I happened to interest. She and her father and mother received me
favourably, as a gentleman who had known better days, and an author
whom the public had undeservedly neglected. How I managed to gain their
confidence and esteem, without alluding to my parentage, it is not worth
while to stop to describe. That I did so you will easily imagine, when
I tell you that the woman to whom I refer, consented, with her father's
full approval, to become my wife.

"The very day of the marriage was fixed. I believed I had successfully
parried all perilous inquiries--but I was wrong. A relation of the
family, whom I had never seen, came to town a short time before the
wedding. We disliked each other on our first introduction. He was a
clever, resolute man of the world, and privately inquired about me to
much better purpose in a few days, than his family had done in
several months. Accident favoured him strangely, everything was
discovered--literally everything--and I was contemptuously dismissed the
house. Could a lady of respectability marry a man (no matter how worthy
in _her_ eyes) whose father had been hanged, whose mother had died in a
madhouse, who had lived under assumed names, who had been driven from an
excellent country neighbourhood, for cruelty to a harmless school-boy?
Impossible!

"With this event, my long strife and struggle with the world ended.

"My eyes opened to a new view of life, and the purpose of life. My first
aspirations to live up to my birth-right position, in spite of adversity
and dishonour, to make my name sweet enough in men's nostrils, to
cleanse away the infamy on my father's, were now no more. The ambition
which--whether I was a hack-author, a travelling portrait-painter, or
an usher at a school--had once whispered to me: low down as you are in
dark, miry ways, you are on the path which leads upward to high places
in the sunshine afar-off; you are not working to scrape together wealth
for another man; you are independent, self-reliant, labouring in your
own cause--the daring ambition which had once counselled thus, sank
dead within me at last. The strong, stern spirit was beaten by spirits
stronger and sterner yet--Infamy and Want.

"I wrote to a man of character and wealth; one of my friends of early
days, who had ceased to hol