A very dull life indeed.  I wonder how I endured it.  The rooms were so dismal, the windows so uneventful.  If it had not been for a room in the garret where I had my playthings, and where the sun came all day long, I am sure I should have been a much worse and more unhappy child.  As I grew older, I tried to adorn my room (my own respectable sleeping room, I mean), with engravings, and the little ornaments that I could buy.  But it was a hopeless attempt.  The walls were so high and so dingy, the little pictures were lost upon them; and the vases on the great black mantel-shelf looked so insignificant, I felt ashamed of them, and owned the unfitness of decorating such a room.  No flowers would grow in those cold north windows—­no bird would sing in sight of such a street.  I gave it up with a sigh; and there was one good instinct lost.

When I was about eleven, I fell foul of some good books.  If it had not been for them, I truly do not see how I could have known that I was not to lie or steal, and that God was to be worshipped.  Certainly, I had had hands slapped many times for taking things I had been forbidden to touch, and had had many a battle in consequence of “telling stories,” with the servants of the house, but I had always recognized the personal spite of the punishments, and they had not carried with them any moral lesson.

I had sometimes gone to church; but the sermons in large city churches are not generally elementary, and I did not understand those that I heard at all.  Occasionally I went with the nurse to Vespers, and that I thought delightful.  I was enraptured with the pictures, the music, the rich clothes of the priests; if it had not been for the bad odor of the neighboring worshippers, I think I might have rushed into the bosom of the Church of Rome.  But that offended sense restrained me.  And so, as I said, if I had not obtained access to some books of holy and pure influence, and been starved by the dullness of the life around me into taking hold of them with eagerness, I should have led the life of a little heathen in the midst of light.  Of course the books were not written for my especial case, nor were they books for children,—­and so, much was supposed, and not expressed, and consequently the truth they imparted to me was but fragmentary.  But it was truth, and the influence was holy.

I was driven to books; I do not believe I had any more desire than most vivid, palpitating, fluttering young things of my sex, to pore over a dull black and white page; but this black and white gate opened to me golden fields of happiness, while I was perishing of hunger in a life of dreary fact.