I will not say that mine tried to kill me, but I do say that they

took precious little care that I was not killed. The effect upon

my body was good, however--the effect of their indifference. This

roughening process is a part of physical training which very few

parents understand. It is essential--should be insisted on--but it

must not be accompanied with a moral roughening, which forces upon

the mind of the pupil the conviction that the ordeal is meant for

his destruction rather than for his good. There will be a recoil of

the heart--a cruel recoil from the humanities--if such a conviction

once fills the mind. It was this recoil which I felt! With warm

affections seeking for objects of love--with feelings of hope and

veneration, imploring for altars to which to attach themselves--I

was commanded to go alone. The wilderness alone was open to me:

what wonder if my heart grew wild and capricious even as that of

the savage who dwells only amid their cheerless recesses? With

a smile judiciously bestowed--with a kind word, a gentle tone, an

occasional voice of earnest encouragement--my uncle and aunt might

have fashioned my heart at their pleasure. I should have been as

clay in the hands of the potter--a pliant willow in the grasp of

the careful trainer. A nature constituted like mine is, of all

others, the most flexible; but it is also, of all others, the most

resisting and incorrigible. Approach it with a judicious regard

to its affections, and you do with it what you please. Let it but

fancy that it is the victim of your injustice, however slight,

and the war is an interminable one between you!

Thus did I learn the first lessons of suspiciousness. They attended

me to the schoolhouse; they governed and made me watchful there.

The schoolhouse, the play-places--the very regions of earnest faith

and unlimited confidence--produced no such effects in me. They might

have done so, had I ceased, on going to school, to see my relatives

any longer. But the daily presence of my uncle and aunt, with their

system of continued injustice, at length rendered my suspicious

moods habitual. I became shy. I approached nobody, or approached

them with doubt and watchfulness. I learned, at the earliest

period, to look into character, to analyze conduct, to pry into the

mysterious involutions of the working minds around me. I traced,

or fancied that I traced, the performance to the unexpressed and

secret motive in which it had its origin. I discovered, or believed

that I discovered, that the world was divided into banditti and

hypocrites. At that day I made little allowance for the existence

of that larger class than all, who happen to be the victims. Unless

this were the larger class, the other two must very much and very

rapidly diminish. My infant philosophy did not carry me very deeply

into the recesses of my own heart. It was enough that I felt some

of its dearest rights to be outraged--I did not care to inquire

whether it was altogether right itself.




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