CHAPTER IV.

No man likes to acknowledge that he has made a mistake in the
choice of his profession, and every man, worthy of the name, will
row long against wind and tide before he allows himself to cry
out, "I am baffled!" and submits to be floated passively back to
land. From the first week of my residence in X---- I felt my
occupation irksome. The thing itself--the work of copying and
translating business-letters--was a dry and tedious task enough,
but had that been all, I should long have borne with the
nuisance; I am not of an impatient nature, and influenced by the
double desire of getting my living and justifying to myself and
others the resolution I had taken to become a tradesman, I should
have endured in silence the rust and cramp of my best faculties;
I should not have whispered, even inwardly, that I longed for
liberty; I should have pent in every sigh by which my heart might
have ventured to intimate its distress under the closeness,
smoke, monotony and joyless tumult of Bigben Close, and its
panting desire for freer and fresher scenes; I should have set up
the image of Duty, the fetish of Perseverance, in my small
bedroom at Mrs. King's lodgings, and they two should have been my
household gods, from which my darling, my cherished-in-secret,
Imagination, the tender and the mighty, should never, either by
softness or strength, have severed me. But this was not all; the
antipathy which had sprung up between myself and my employer
striking deeper root and spreading denser shade daily, excluded
me from every glimpse of the sunshine of life; and I began to