little life drift out by itself into an open sea of dangers and
difficulties, with nothing more wholesome to distract it during the
long lonely hours of many successive days, as they come and go, than
its own morbid tendencies.

Necessarily, this abnormal growth of an impressionable young soul,
began to speak for itself, in accents which would have caught the
ready, willing ear of an attentive parent, had mine been such. In my
twelfth year I was as much a woman as I am to-day, matured and
hardened by an experience that would have blighted a more yielding and
less obdurate spirit.

Convinced, that in point of fact, I was alone in the world, dependent
upon my own resources for whatever little truant ray of sunshine I
might get from the golden flood that illuminated the world outside me,
and forced by rigid, arbitrary circumstances to train my growing
convictions into many a hazardous channel, left to myself to grope
among the dawning mysteries of life, that are a burden to age and
experience even when lightened by the helping hand of a common
sympathy, I ceased before long to struggle against these abstract foes
that made a mockery of my childish strength and resistance.

For the first few years of my life, therefore, I had been my own care,
my own and only friend, and oftentimes my own--but not only--enemy.
Occasionally my father chatted with me, but that was mostly when I was
in good humour, and would not let him get an insight into the secret
workings of my busy little heart. But, even supposing I had, with a
child's instinctive confidence in its parent, gone to him in my lonely
hours, and thrown my hands convulsively about his neck, to tell my
tale of trifling woes, what difference would it have made? Very