, I found my means had
become reduced to about three thousand dollars. This awoke in my
bosom a new cause of anxiety. If my father should not recover his
reason in two or three years, I would have nothing upon which to
support him, and be compelled to see him taken to some public
institution for the insane, there to be treated without that
tenderness and regard which a daughter can exercise toward her
parent. This fear haunted me terribly.

"It was near the end of the period I have named, that I met with an
account of the Massachusetts Insane Hospital, situated in
Charlestown in this State. I was pleased with the manner in which
patients were represented to be treated, and found that, by
investing in Boston the balance of my little property, the income
would be sufficient to pay for my father's maintenance there. As for
myself, I had no fear but that with my needle, or in some other way,
I could easily earn enough to supply my own limited wants. A long
conference with one of the physicians who had attended my father,
raised my hopes greatly as to the benefits which might result from
his being placed in an institution so well conducted.

"As soon as this idea had become fully formed in my mind, I sold off
all our little stock of furniture, and with the meager supply of
clothing to which I had limited myself, ventured once more to try
the perils of the sea. After a quick passage, we arrived in Boston.
My father I at once had placed in the asylum, after having invested
nearly every dollar I had in bank stock, the dividends from which
were guaranteed to the institution for his support, so long as he
remained one of its inmates. This was early in the last fall. I had
then but a few dollars left, and no income. I was in a strange city,
dependent entirely upon my own resources. And what were they? 'What
am I to do? Where am I to go for employment?' were questions I found
hard indeed to answer. Twenty dollars were all I possessed in the
world; and this sum, at a hotel, would not last me, I knew, over two
or three weeks. I therefore sought out a private boarding-house,
where, under an assumed name, I got a room and my board for two
dollars a week. The woman who kept the boarding-house, and to whom I
communicated my wish to get sewing, gave me half a dozen plain
shirts to make for her husband, for which I received fifty cents
each. This was all the work I obtained during the first two weeks I
was in the house, and it yielded m