This was, at first, the
most bitter punishment; but sullen pride, or a kind of stupid
desperation, made me, at length, almost regardless of the contempt,
which had wrung from me so many solitary 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.
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