tears at the only moments when I was allowed to rest.

"Thus was I the mark of cruelty till my sixteenth year; and then I have
only to point out a change of misery; for a period I never knew.
Allow me first to make one observation. Now I look back, I cannot help
attributing the greater part of my misery, to the misfortune of having
been thrown into the world without the grand support of life--a mother's
affection. I had no one to love me; or to make me respected, to enable
me to acquire respect. I was an egg dropped on the sand; a pauper by
nature, hunted from family to family, who belonged to nobody--and nobody
cared for me. I was despised from my birth, and denied the chance of
obtaining a footing for myself in society. Yes; I had not even the
chance of being considered as a fellow-creature--yet all the people with
whom I lived, brutalized as they were by the low cunning of trade, and
the despicable shifts of poverty, were not without bowels, though they
never yearned for me. I was, in fact, born a slave, and chained by
infamy to slavery during the whole of existence, without having any
companions to alleviate it by sympathy, or teach me how to rise above it
by their example. But, to resume the thread of my tale--

"At sixteen, I suddenly grew tall, and something like comeliness
appeared on a Sunday, when I had time to wash my face, and put on clean
clothes. My master had once or twice caught hold of me in the passage;
but I instinctively avoided his disgusting caresses. One day however,
when the family were at a methodist meeting, he contrived to be alone in
the house with me, and by blows--yes; blows and menaces, compelled me to
submit to his ferocious desire; and, to avoid my mistress's fury, I was
obliged in future to comply, and skulk to my loft at his command, in
spite of increasing loathing.

"The anguish which was now pent up in my bosom, seemed to open a new
world to me: I began to extend my thoughts beyond myself, and grieve for
human misery, till I discovered, with horror--ah! what horror!--that I
was with child. I know not why I felt a mixed sensation of despair and
tenderness, excepting that, ever called a bastard, a bastard appeared to
me an object of the greatest compassion in creation.

"I communicated this dreadful circumstance to my master, who was almost
equally alarmed at the intelligence; for he feared his wife, and public
censure at the meeting. After some weeks of deliberation had elapsed, I