iate my affections: plain
human nature, in its humblest and most homely apparel, was enough for me,
and I loved the child because she was my partner in wretchedness. If she
is now living she is probably a mother, with children of her own; but, as
I have said, I could never trace her.

This I regret; but another person there was at that time whom I have
since sought to trace with far deeper earnestness, and with far deeper
sorrow at my failure. This person was a young woman, and one of that
unhappy class who subsist upon the wages of prostitution. I feel no
shame, nor have any reason to feel it, in avowing that I was then on
familiar and friendly terms with many women in that unfortunate
condition. The reader needs neither smile at this avowal nor frown; for,
not to remind my classical readers of the old Latin proverb, "_Sine
cerere_," &c., it may well be supposed that in the existing state of my
purse my connection with such women could not have been an impure one.
But the truth is, that at no time of my life have I been a person to hold
myself polluted by the touch or approach of any creature that wore a
human shape; on the contrary, from my very earliest youth it has been my
pride to converse familiarly, _more Socratio_, with all human beings,
man, woman, and child, that chance might fling in my way; a practice
which is friendly to the knowledge of human nature, to good feelings, and
to that frankness of address which becomes a man who would be thought a
philosopher. For a philosopher should not see with the eyes of the poor
limitary creature calling himself a man of the world, and filled with
narrow and self-regarding prejudices of birth and education, but should
look upon himself as a catholic creature, and as standing in equal
relation to high and low, to educated and uneducated, to the guilty and
the innocent. Being myself at that time of necessity a peripatetic, or a
walker of the streets, I naturally fell in more frequently with those
female peripatetics who are technically called street-walkers. Many of
these women had occasionally taken my part against watchmen who wished to
drive me off the steps of houses where I was sitting. But one amongst
them, the one on whose account I have at all introduced this subject--yet
no! let me not class the, oh! noble-minded Ann--with that order of women.
Let me find, if it be possible, some gentler name to designate the
condition of her to whose bounty and compassion,